SNMP is an industry standard protocol for managing network devices, and includes an application layer protocol, a database schema, and a set of data objects. SNMP exposes management data in the form of accessible variables on the system, describing the system configuration in its entirety. These variables can be queried (and sometimes set) by management applications.

SNMP is widely used for monitoring of network devices. While it can be leveraged for configuring network devices, it is not widely deployed for this purpose. This is due in part to the fact SNMP lacks a defined discovery process which makes it challenging to find the correct MIB (Management Information Base) modules and elements for each platform. SNMP also suffers from limitations inherent to use of the UDP protocol which is stateless and considered a less-than-reliable transport. It has also been burdened by a lack of effective MIB standardization efforts.