SNMP beginnings?

The protocol was developed in the mid-late 1980's. It was designed to be simple so that there would be nothing to be in the way of it's deployment. There were several factors in it's design. The first was interoperability meaning you could deploy it and be assured it would work across all platforms. The next was robustness meaning that it would not easily fail. The next was low overhead. Therefore it limited itself to the UDP or User Datagram Protocol. This meant that the deployer was responsible for lost and retransmitted packets and this was considered essential. The last was in ease of debugging the protocol.

this page last updated: November 1998