Monitoring Tool , SNMP

Monitorting Tools such as HP Openview, IBM Tivoli Monitoring Software,

Empirix Onesight, Solarwinds, nagious, MRTG etc are used to monitori

the health of the all the elements in an IT infrastructure that includes

everting router, network traffic, switches, servers,gateway etc , and view /

store the data in central space that is used for Monitoring/ reviewing etc.

The innerworking of all this tools is same and all use the SNMP

(Simple Network Monitoring Protocol)

SNMP has two major components Manager and Agents.

SNMP defines how a manager communicates with an agent.

It defines the format a requests that manager sends to an agent

and the format of replies than an agent returns.

MIB (Management Information Base) is the set of all objects

SNMP can access. Objects in SNMP are defined with a certain

naming scheme which assigns each object a long prefix that

guarantees the name will be unique. Object with MIB

name - iso.org.dod.internet.mgmt.mib.ip.inInReceives.

Now when this object is represented in an SNMP message, each

part is assigned an integer. OID for the above name is - 1.3.6.1.2.1.4.3

One of the Open source tools which uses the above technology is

MRTG ( Multi Router Traffic Grapher)

MRTG :

Multi Router Traffic Grapher is a tool generally used to monitor

traffic load on network links. People also use MRTG to monitor

things such as system Load, Login sessions disk space etc.

MRTG generates HTML pages containing PNG images which

provides visual representation of the item monitored. MRTG

consists of a Perl Script which uses SNMP to read monitorig item

counters and a fast C program which logs the gathered data and

creates graphs representing the data received. This graphs are

embedded into webpages which can be viewed from any modern

Web-browser