A uniform resource identifier scheme for SNMP

One of the World Wide Web characteristics, besides its omnipresence in computer systems, is the adoption of a universal user interface that is used to access several different services that were previously accessed individually by independent applications. Internet resources started to be identified by URI (uniform resource identifier) schemes, a text string with specific syntax and grammar. Although existing for several services such as http, ftp, gopher and news, these identifiers are not used to identify SNMP resources. This paper proposes a URI scheme for identifying SNMP resources and presents some practical scenarios where the existence of such a compact and complete identifying mechanism increases flexibility and functionality of network management applications.