To collect management information from device or application, you
need an interface called agent to communicate to them and retrieve
information. At situations of large networks, managing devices or
applications and retrieving information becomes complex. The WebNMS
Agent toolkit generates the agent framework that is capable of managing
any number of devices or applications in the network.
Moreover, most of the management systems are built from top to
bottom either by SNMP, TL1 or HTTP. The Agent Toolkit is a development
tool used for building Java based standalone SNMP, Multi-protocol
(that includes SNMP, CORBA, RMI, HTTP, and TL1), and standalone
TL1 agents. It consist of comprehensive suite of Java based cross
platform development tools, framework, and APIs to be used across
many operating systems, thus addressing the needs of fast paced
environment for developing application/system management agents.
Few Key Features are:
Open Standards: Agent Toolkit Java Edition is built on standard
technologies like JMX, Java Beans, XML, JFC, JDBC, HTTP, RMI,
CORBA, SNMP, TL1, etc. Given the power and ease-of-use of these
new Internet technologies, developers can now provide better solutions
faster and at a lower cost of ownership including lower cost of
development than before.
Cross Platform
Solaris, Windows NT/2000, and LINUX supported out-of-the-box.
Management Protocols.
Development and test tools: Agent Toolkit Java Edition provides
comprehensive set of UI (editors, compilers and browsers) and
command line tools for easy and faster development and testing
of agents.
With the different agents supported, let us see an overview of
how Agent Toolkit is used to develop Multi-Protocol agents. These
agents provide multi-protocol access to common management information
through adaptors or connectors for various protocols such as SNMP,
RMI, HTTP, CORBA, HTML, and TL1. You just have to instrument once
to access with any protocol. You can also create your own custom
protocol adaptors and plug them into the multi-protocol agent architecture.
Multi-Protocol agent architecture comprises of the following components:
Instrumentation Level: The agent instrumentation
is done here and made it available as Java components called MBeans.
MBeans encapsulate manageable objects as attributes and operations
and exposes them to management applications.
Agent Level: The manager requests are received
and processed here. This level handles the different protocols
and converts manager requests into the common protocol independent
instrumentation provided by MBeans. The task of converting from
specific protocols is done by protocol-specific adaptors/connectors.
These interface with a common MBean server, which controls and
interacts with the MBeans.
Connector Level (Adaptor): Adaptors and connectors are protocol
handlers, which expose MBeans information to their respective
protocol clients/managers. An agent may contain any number of
connectors or protocol adaptors.
The Multi-Protocol architecture is applicable to network management,
remote system maintenance, application provisioning, and the new
management needs of the service-based network.