SNMP v's SYSLOG

[rickd12345]

Hi,

Can someone please advise, or point me in the right direction, to find out what exactly is the difference between snmp and syslog?

I am looking at logging notifications/ warnings from my routers to a monitoring workstation and am unsure which one to use.

I understand that you can also force changes to equipment with snmp but I am simply bothered about looking for changes in states (links up down etc).

I have tried kiwi syslog daemeon and this works well and all I have to do is add the "logging" command to my cisco.

Is this a good way of monitoring my kit or will snmp offer me more ? If so what would I use to capture the changes in state. Will it report to a syslog server ?

Or should both be use alongside each other for differnet roles and if so what are they ?

any thoughts greatly appreciated,

Richard

[pkhatri]

Hi Richard,

Syslog is strictly a logging tool. The router will send syslog messages to your server as and when they occur.

On the other hand, SNMP is more of a monitoring tool that also gives you asynchronous notification of events (in the form of traps). In that second respect, SNMP and syslog are similar. However, SNMP gives you the ability to actively poll the routers, which you do not get with syslog.

One advantage of syslog is that you can maintain long-running history files of your logs (although some SNMP managers will let you store history files for your traps).

In networks I use, we use both of them and they provide complementary functions: SNMP gives us polling info and traps which we need to act on urgently and syslog stores data for us that we sometimes need to determine issues that may have occurred some time ago.

Hope that helps - pls rate the post if it does.

Paresh