FREE IEEE PAPER One approach to the development of custom SNMP agents and integration with management systems

SOME TEXT FROM PAPER One approach to the development of custom SNMP agents and integration with management systems

The proposed SNMP agent is designed using OpenDMK Java libraries. The Project OpenDMK source code is based on the Java Dynamic Management Kit version 5.1 (Java DMK), with the exception of some legacy or deprecated APIs which were removed. OpenDMK provides the necessary tools for integration of Java technology with SNMP Internet network management standard. OpenDMK compatibility with SNMP-based management model enables the development of an agent using the Java programming language, which can be accessed via SNMP protocol [5]. Our SNMP agent developed using this toolkit is completely independent of the SNMP management application installed in the manger station, which allows integration of the developed agent with different management systems. The developed agent is a process that is executed on a managed device that realizes the communication with the managing entity for the purpose of realization management operations. This communication will be later verified by integration of the SNMP agent with two monitoring entities (applications) - Zenoss and Cacti.

In order to test the implemented SNMP agent we performed integration with two network management systems: Zenoss and Cacti. Zenoss is a powerful open source IT monitoring product, while Cacti is an open source, web-based graphing tool designed as a frontend to RRDtool's data storage and graphing functionality.

Since Cacti is only graphing tool, it does not support receiving SNMP trap messages, however it is possible to monitor managed entities using SNMP polling. In order to integrate custom agent with Cacti, it is necessary to define Extensible Markup Language (XML) file that represents a description of MIB table structure. Fig.8 represents XML file that describes MIB table structure for implemented agent.

Because Cacti management system has no support for the acceptance of SNMP Trap it does not provide the ability to fully test the functionality of our implemented agent. Therefore, the SNMP agent has been integrated with another management system, Zenoss. Zenoss provides complete testing of the installed agent, through retrieving/setting the values of managed objects in the MIB and the acceptance of Trap messages. To perform the integration of our agent and management system Zenoss, it is necessary that the MIB, we have designed, is added into the base of non-standard MIB's used by Zenoss, and define the device we want to monitor

The aim of this paper - to explore the possibility of custom agents development and their integration within standard network management systems - has been achieved in the following way. According to the given approach an implementation of one simple SNMP agent using OpenDMK libraries is performed. As is shown in previous chapter, the integration is performed with several network management systems (e.g. Cacti, Zenoss) and tests have confirmed the success of integration. We see future work in researching the possibility of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based agents development and their integration within current network management systems.

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