In most cases Lithium uses SNMP to monitor your network devices. In the case of Apple's server hardware (Xserves, Xserve RAIDs and Xsans) we have actually put the effort in to understand and utilise Apple's protocols. Because of the wide variety of information available via SNMP, we chose to use a Device / Vendor module model. These loadable modules provide extensible monitoring functionality to suite the needs of a growing number of devices.