SNMP revolves around Management Information Bases (MIBs), which are structured databases that define what information each ...

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a necessary tool for every network administrator. You can easily configure it with just a few commands.

Also, if you are going to do network monitoring, take a look a Cacti, another free tool that is aimed specially towards network monitoring (SNMP, routers, etc).

Open-source Zabbix network-monitoring software has the granularity enterprises need but requires a lot of manual configuration and has some limits on exportable reports.