Why do we need SNMP interfaces status monitoring
Some times certain interfaces within a node do not have an IP address. A common example is the interfaces of a switch, and another example is an interface that has an IP address but is that address in not reached by monitoring agent. In order to know the status of these interfaces we can ask their containing node, what is their status using the SNMP protocol.

The SNMP status monitor is an agent of the Genie - monitoring platform product that sends SNMP requests to query the administrational and operational status of given interfaces and analyzes the reply from the devices.

The agent was built to perform this operation very fast using asynchronous operations and complex algorithms, that enables it to monitor tens of thousands of interfaces in cycles of around a minute. The agent does not wait for a response from a given node to monitor other nodes.

It contains many flow control parameters that enables it to work in all kinds of networks, with equipments that support the SNMP protocol in different ways.
The agent supports on the node level:

• Monitoring frequency
• Monitoring hours
• Timeout of no reply
• Retry count
• The number of SNMP queries sent concurrently to a given node
• The number of SNMP OIDs combined in a single request

and more...

Status Measurement
TThe agent's basic function is to monitor the status of the selected interfaces. It checks if the node containing the interface responded to the request and if yes, what was its response, and according to that it sets the interface's status.

When a status change is discovered, it launches an event handler which is a user defined command. The user defined command can for example send an snmp trap to a management platform, or send a message to an operator.

The product is able to generate an alert message if the interface is flickering (i.e. changes status too often). There is an option to specify a limit of status rotation within a day. Above this limit an event handler will be launched.