Efficient Instrumentation of Management Information Models with SNMP

We propose the introduction of a Polling Layer that allows the efficient instrumentation of the management information models for the use of monitoring-intensive management applications. The polling layer allows to optimize the number of polling packets sent to the SNMP agents to collect management data. We describe the architecture of the polling layer that allows the management applications to specify their exact requirements for polling operations. We show how the knowledge of these requirements, combined with an efficient use of SNMP packets, lead to an important gain in the generated polling packets. This gain gets more important under heavy monitoring load. Being completely written in Java, the polling layer can be easily integrated into management systems and applications in different ways. Finally, we show the advantages of the polling layer over different other approaches and we discuss its tradeoffs.