This work provides a readable and sometimes entertaining description of network management and the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). The author deals with two important philosophies of the Internet community pertaining to standards development, the importance of implementation experience and the importance of clean design with an absence of extraneous features. He utilizes his personal experience of both the OSI and Internet protocols to offer constructive criticism of their strengths and weaknesses. Marshall Rose describes how the OSI, Internet, and proprietary architectures fit together in the global Internet that is now coming about.