Operation Manual – SNMP and RMON 
Quidway S3900 Series Ethernet Switches-Release 1510  Chapter 2  RMON Configuration
 
Huawei Technologies Proprietary 
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Chapter 2  RMON Configuration 
2.1  Introduction to RMON 
Remote monitoring (RMON) is a kind of management information base (MIB) defined 
by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and is a most important enhancement made 
to MIB II standards. RMON is mainly used to monitor the data traffic across a network 
segment or even the entire network, and is currently a commonly used network 
management standard. 
An RMON system comprises of two parts: the network management station (NMS) and 
the agents running on each network device. RMON agents operate on network 
monitors or network probes to collect and keep track of the statistics of the traffic across 
the network segments to which their ports connect such as the total number of the 
packets on a network segment in a specific period of time and the total number of 
packets that are sent to a specific host successfully. 
RMON is fully based on simple network management protocol (SNMP) architecture. It 
is compatible with the current SNMP, so that you can implement RMON without 
modifying SNMP. RMON enables SNMP to monitor remote network devices more 
effectively and actively, thus providing a satisfactory means of monitoring the operation 
of the subnet. With RMON, the communication traffic between NMS and agents is 
reduced, thus facilitating the management of large-scale internetworks. 
2.1.1  Working Mechanism of RMON 
RMON allows multiple monitors. It collects data in one of the following two ways: 
z  Using the dedicated RMON probe. When an ROM system operates in this way, 
the NMS directly obtains management information from the RMON probes and 
controls the network resources. In this case, all information in the RMON MIB can 
be obtained. 
z  Embedding RMON agents into network devices (such as routers, switches and 
hubs) directly to make the latter capable of RMON probe functions. When an 
RMON system operates in this way, the NMS collects network management 
information by exchanging information with the SNMP agents using the basic 
SNMP commands. However, this way depends on device resources heavily and 
an NMS operating in this way can only obtain four groups of information (instead of 
all the information in the RMON MIB). The four groups are alarm group, event 
group, history group and statistics group. 
An S3900 series switch implements RMON in the second way. With the embedded 
RMON agent, the S3900 series switch can serve as a network device with the RMON 
probe function. Through the RMON-capable SNMP agents running on the Ethernet