24.4. SNMP

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a standardized protocol for network management. It is very commonly used and implemented across many applications and network devices. Platforms such as OpenNMS,^[216] an open source network management platform, use SNMP (among other things). Asterisk supports SNMP through the res_snmp module. This section discusses the installation and configuration of res_snmp, as well as how it can be utilized by a platform like OpenNMS.

^[216] OpenNMS is certainly not the only platform that could be used with the res_snmp module. However, we chose to discuss it here for a number of reasons. First, OpenNMS is a very good network management platform that has Asterisk-specific integration. Second, it’s open source and 100% free. Lastly, Jeff Gehlbach of OpenNMS has contributed to the development of Asterisk, most notably making significant improvements to the SNMP support. He was also nice enough to help us get all of this stuff working so that we could document it.

24.4.1. Installing the SNMP Module for Asterisk

By default, Asterisk will not compile the SNMP development module, since a dependency needs to be satisfied first.