Package org.snmp4j

Provides classes and interfaces for creating, sending, and receiving SNMP messages.

See:
          Description

Interface Summary
CommandResponder CommandResponder process incoming request, report and notification PDUs.
MessageDispatcher The MessageDispatcher interface defines common services of instances that process incoming SNMP messages and dispatch them to interested CommandResponder instances.
Session Session defines a common interface for all classes that implement SNMP protocol operations based on SNMP4J.
Snmp.ReportHandler Interface for handling reports.
Target A Target interface defines an abstract representation of a remote SNMP entity.
TimeoutModel The TimeoutModel is the common interface for all models of timing out a SNMP request.
TransportMapping The TransportMapping defines the common interface for SNMP transport mappings.
User Common interface that has to be implemented by all user based security models user classes.
 

Class Summary
AbstractTarget A AbstratTarget class is an abstract representation of a remote SNMP entity.
CommandResponderEvent The CommandResponderEvent is fired by the MessageDispatcher to listeners that potentially can process the included request, report, or trap/notification.
CommunityTarget A CommunityTarget represents SNMP target properties for community based message processing models (SNMPv1 and SNMPv2c).
DefaultTimeoutModel The DefaultTimeoutModel implements a timeout model that uses constant timeouts between retries.
MessageDispatcherImpl The MessageDispatcherImpl decodes and dispatches incoming messages using MessageProcessingModel instances and encodes and sends outgoing messages using an appropriate TransportMapping instances.
MutablePDU The MutablePDU is a container for a PDU instance.
PDU The PDU class represents a SNMP protocol data unit.
PDUv1 The PDUv1 represents SNMPv1 PDUs.
ScopedPDU The ScopedPDU class represents a SNMPv3 scoped PDU.
SecureTarget The SecureTarget is an security model independent abstract class for all targets supporting secure SNMP communication.
Snmp The Snmp class is the core of SNMP4J.
SNMP4JSettings The SNMP4JSettings class implements a central configuration class of the SNMP4J framework.
UserTarget User based target for SNMPv3 or later.
 

Exception Summary
MessageException The MessageException represents information about an exception occured during message processing.
 

Package org.snmp4j Description

Provides classes and interfaces for creating, sending, and receiving SNMP messages.

The org.snmp4j classes are capable of creating, sending, and receiving SNMPv1/v2c/v3 messages. A SNMP message is composed of its message header and its PDU payload. This package contains three main groups of classes and interfaces:

The following UML package diagram illustrates the dependencies between the packages of the core SNMP4J API. Users of the API normally only need to use the org.snmp4j and the org.snmp4j.smi packages directly.

SNMP4J UML Package Diagram

The following UML class diagram shows the most important classes of the org.snmp4j package and their relationships (relationships to other packages are not shown):.

UML Class Diagram org.snmp4j

SNMP Messages and Targets

To exchange a SNMP message with a remote system, that system has to be identified, retransmission, and timeout policy information about the message exchange has to be specified. A remote system is specified with SNMP4J by creating a Target instance appropriate for the SNMP protocol to be used.

A SNMP message consists of the message's payload, the SNMP Protocol Data Unit (PDU) and a message header. Simplified said, in SNMP4J the message header information is represented by Target instances and the PDU is represented by one of the following classes:

Thus, in order to be able to send a SNMP message with SNMP4J, a PDU instance and a Target instance have to be created.

PDU Examples

Target Examples

Sending SNMP messages

SNMP message are sent with SNMP4J by using a instance of the SNMP Session interface. The default implementation of this interface is the Snmp class.

To setup a Snmp instance it is sufficient to call its constructor with a TransportMapping instance. The transport mapping is used by the SNMP session to send (and receive) SNMP message to a remote systems by using a transport protocol, for example the User Datagram Protocol (UDP).

A SNMP4J Snmp instance supports SNMP v1, v2c, and v3 by default. By sub-classing Snmp other combinations of those SNMP protocol versions can be supported.

With SNMP4J, SNMP messages can be sent synchronously (blocking) and asynchronously (non-blocking). The Snmp class does not use an internal thread to process responses on asynchronous and synchronous requests. Nevertheless it uses the receiver threads of the transport mappings to process responses.

Asynchronous responses are returned by calling a callback method on an object instance that implements the ResponseListener interface. The callback is carried out on behalf of the transport mapping thread that received the response packet from the wire. Thus, if the called method blocks, the delivery of synchronous and asynchronous messages received on the listen port of that transport mapping will be also blocked. Other transport mapping will not be affected. Blocking can be avoided by either using synchronous messages only or by decoupling the processing within the callback method.

Example for Sending a Synchronous Message

import org.snmp4j.*;
...
Snmp snmp = new Snmp(new DefaultUdpTransportMapping());
snmp.listen();
...
ResponseEvent response = snmp.send(requestPDU, target);
if (response.getResponse() == null) {
    // request timed out
    ...
}
else {
    System.out.println("Received response from: "+
                       response.getPeerAddress());
    // dump response PDU
    System.out.println(response.getResponse().toString());
}

Example for Sending an Asynchronous Message

import org.snmp4j.*;
import org.snmp4j.event.*;
...
Snmp snmp = new Snmp(new DefaultUdpTransportMapping());
snmp.listen();
...
ResponseListener listener = new ResponseListener() {
    public void onResponse(ResponseEvent event) {
       // Always cancel async request when response has been received
       // otherwise a memory leak is created! Not canceling a request
       // immediately can be useful when sending a request to a broadcast
       // address.
       ((Snmp)event.getSource()).cancel(event.getRequest(), this);
        PDU response = event.getResponse();
        PDU request = event.getRequest();
        if (response == null) {
            System.out.println("Request "+request+" timed out");
        }
        else {
            System.out.println("Received response "+response+" on request "+
                               request);
        }
    }
};
snmp.sendPDU(request, target, null, listener);
...

Receiving SNMP messages

SNMP4J receives SNMP messages through the listen port of transport mappings. In order to be able to receive responses or requests, that port needs to be set into listen mode. This has to be done by calling the listen() method of the TransportMapping instance to start the transport mappings internal listen thread. The internal thread is stopped and the listen port is closed by calling the close() method on the TransportMapping instance or the associated Snmp instance.

The transport mapping just receives the SNMP mesage as a stream of bytes and forwards the message to associated MessageDispatcher instances. By default, SNMP4J uses one instance of the MessageDispatcherImpl class for decoding and dispatching incoming messages. That instance is created and used internally by the Snmp class.

The Snmp class processes responses to outstanding requests and forwards PDUs of other SNMP messages to registered CommandResponder listener instances. To receive SNMP messages it is thus sufficient to

  1. Create a TransportMapping and initialize its listen port by calling TransportMapping.listen().
  2. Create a Snmp instance with the above TransportMapping.
  3. Instantiate a class that implements the CommandResponder interface and register it with the Snmp instance by calling Snmp.addCommandResponder(CommandResponder).

When a unhandled SNMP message (thus a SNMP message where no corresponding outstanding request exists) is received, then the processPdu(CommandResponderEvent) method of the CommandResponder will be called with the decoded PDU and additional information about the received SNMP message provided by the message processing model that has decoded the SNMP message.

Example for Receiving SNMP Messages

import org.snmp4j.*;
import org.snmp4j.smi.*;
import org.snmp4j.mp.SnmpConstants;
...
TransportMapping transport =
    new DefaultUdpTransportMapping(new UdpAddress("0.0.0.0/161"));
Snmp snmp = new Snmp(transport);
if (version == SnmpConstants.version3) {
    byte[] localEngineID =
        ((MPv3)snmp.getMessageProcessingModel(MessageProcessingModel.MPv3)).createLocalEngineID();
    USM usm = new USM(SecurityProtocols.getInstance(),
                      new OctetString(localEngineID), 0);
    SecurityModels.getInstance().addSecurityModel(usm);
    snmp.setLocalEngine(localEngineID, 0, 0);
    // Add the configured user to the USM
    ...
}
snmp.addCommandResponder(this);
snmp.listen();
...
public synchronized void processPdu(CommandResponderEvent e) {
    PDU command = e.getPdu();
    if (command != null) {
    ...
    }
}


Copyright 2005-2010 Frank Fock (SNMP4J.org)

Copyright © 2011 SNMP4J.org. All Rights Reserved.