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In the past, manufacturers all provided different facilities for accessing the values of various parameters within their hardware. A network manager in this situation is forced to use multiple software interfaces to view and set the operating parameters for each network node.
What network managers need is a single interface that can query and set operational parameters for any piece of hardware connected to the network. This kind of interface is sometimes called a Network Management Station.
In order to make a Network Management Station (NMS) possible, you first need a protocol that an NMS can use to communicate with network nodes.
For networks based on the Internet Protocol (IP), the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) has emerged as the most widely used means for gathering information on the status of individual nodes on the network and making changes in the operational parameters of the nodes.