Why is SNMP usually run over UDP and not TCP/IP?

Question

This morning, there were big problems at work because an SNMP trap didn\'t \"go through\" because SNMP is run over UDP. I remember from the networking class in college that

Answer 1

The use of traps with SNMP is considered unreliable. You really should not be relying on traps.

SNMP was designed to be used as a request/response protocol. The protocol details are simple (hence the name, "simple network management protocol"). And UDP is a very simple transport. Try implementing TCP on your basic agent - it's considerably more complex than a simple agent coded using UDP.

SNMP get/getnext operations have a retry mechanism - if a response is not received within timeout then the same request is sent up to a maximum number of tries.