Monitoring Community Clouds: The Lightweight Network Management Protocol

The simple network monitoring protocol (SNMP) is currently seen as the de-facto standard for network monitoring in IT settings. It is usually used in conjunction with tools such as Cacti, Zabbix and Zenoss to provide most of the features that IT professionals require to efficiently monitor network systems. However, SNMP is not be suitable for the emerging ubiquitous networking applications where energy frugal devices with limited storage and processing are usually deployed unattended sometimes with intermittent power supply. Furthermore, the client server model underlying SNMP may create traffic bottlenecks and a single point of failure for the underlying monitoring systems. Building upon these limitations, this paper proposes the lightweight network management protocol (LNMP) and demonstrates its relative efficiency compared to SNMP. Preliminary experimental results reveal that LNMP simplifies the network monitoring process and results in a more flexible and platform portable code for community clouds.