Does Spectrum support SNMP Polling over TCP?

Products

• Spectrum
• Network Observability

Issue/Introduction

We want to switch over to TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) for SNMP communication as we learnt TCP is more reliable compared to UDP (User Datagram Protocol). We would like to find out if this can be configured in Spectrum.

Does Spectrum SNMP Polling support TCP? If yes, how can we enable SNMP polling over TCP in Spectrum?

Environment

All releases of Spectrum running on supported platforms

Resolution

Spectrum does not support SNMP Polling over TCP.

The following RFC 3430 document describes that SNMP over TCP has experimental status.

• https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3430
• https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc3430/

Based on RFC 1157 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1157), SNMP is using UDP. UDP has the following advantages:

1. UDP does not carry overhead as TCP, therefore it would not consume higher bandwidth when compared to TCP
2. UDP is faster than TCP because UDP does not order packets
3. UDP is a connectionless protocol and may be termed unreliable but SNMP doesn’t require reliability as each request generates a response. In the event where SNMP does not receive a response, it would issue the request again

As the time this article is written, enabling SNMP Polling over TCP is not supported by Spectrum.

Additional Information

Additional URLs:

• https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3430
• https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc3430/
• https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1157