Rapid prototyping and development tool for building Java-based SNMP agents, TL1 agents, and Multi-protocol agents.

Introduction

WebNMS Agent Toolkit Java Edition is a productive development environment for building Java-based Multi-protocol (JMX 1.0) agents. Evolving networks contain various devices and applications with different management protocols. Effective management is required for these critical business resources that need to interact with different managers. As these resources need to communicate with multiple managers, information must be exposed via different protocols. Multi-protocol becomes critical factor in device/application management. Multi-protocol (JMX) agent offers the flexibility for devices and applications to interact with legacy and evolving enterprise applications.

OEMs, enterprises, middleware ISVs, and service providers need Multi-protocol agent to manage their applications/devices via standard Network Management Consoles. WebNMS Agent Toolkit Java Edition's integrated agent development environment offers standards-based, highly developer productive, and proven platform to build Multi-protocol (JMX 1.0 compatible) agents with reduced agent development cycle.

Key Features

• JMX 1.0 compatible agent.
• Support for SNMP, HTML, RMI, CORBA, HTTP, and TL1 adaptor.
• SNMP adaptor that provides complete SNMPv1, SNMPv2c, and SNMPv3 support.
• JMX-SNMP Proxy feature provides HTTP/RMI/CORBA (multi-protocol) access to leverage legacy SNMP agents.
• Cascader Service that offers highly scalable master-subagent architecture for distributed application management and leveraging legacy systems.
• Discovery service for automatic discovery of other agents in the network.
• Heartbeat support for monitoring sub-agent status.
• View-based authorization and authentication support for providing granular security.
• Generic adaptor and enhanced client framework to build new protocol adaptors and clients.
• Out-of-the-box adaptors support.
• Client API for RMI, HTTP, and CORBA adaptors.
• SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) support for RMI, HTTP, and HTML Adaptors.
• Logging feature to generate log messages at agent runtime.

Developer Benefits

Agent Development Environment: Enhanced and integrated tools reduce the time to develop multi-protocol agent, increase the developer productivity, and offers reduced time-to-market.

Standards-based Architecture: Built on standard technologies, such as JMX, SNMP, TL1, HTML,  RMI, CORBA, and XML offers a viable platform for integration with any  standard management console.

Multi-Protocol Agent Development Experience

Multi-protocol agent offers access to agent information via other protocols, such as HTTP, RMI, CORBA, and SOAP. Developers can instrument once and access with any protocol.

Multi-Protocol Agent Development Cycle

• Load MIBs in the JMX Compiler.
  
• Generate Multi-protocol agents using JMX Compiler. This generates the stubs as Java files.
  
• Compile the agent after performing agent instrumentation. The generated agent is ready to be accessed with any protocol.
  
• Test and verify multi-protocol agents with manager application tools in the product. (MIB Browser,  MBean Browser, and HTML Browser).

The generated multi-protocol agent can be deployed on any platform with JVM support and seamlessly integrated with any Network or Enterprise Management Console.

The following diagram illustrates the steps in agent development cycle:

Multi-Protocol Agent Runtime Architecture

The Multi-Protocol agent runtime architecture explains the components and functions.

Multi-Protocol Agent Components

MBeans: MBeans or Managed Bean is a Java object that represents the JMX-manageable resource. A JMX-manageable resource is one that is instrumented in accordance with the JMX instrumentation-level specification.

MBean Server: It is a registry for MBeans in the agent. It offers services for working with the MBeans.

Adaptors: It allows management applications to access the Multi-Protocol agent. It is mandatory to have at least one adaptor for providing Multi-Protocol access.

Any Java application that needs to be managed must be wrapped as an MBean and registered in an MBean Server. The MBeans expose the manageable information of an application. Using a manager application, the exposed data can be accessed through adaptors. Agent Toolkit Java Edition provides JMX Compiler to generate MBeans for the manageable resource. It provides the MBeanServer where all the MBeans get registered and the necessary adaptors available enable the manager to access the agent.

Supported Standards

WebNMS Agent Toolkit Java Edition supports the following standards:

Standards Compatibility	Supported Version
JMX	1.0
SNMP	SNMP v1, SNMP v2c, SNMP v3
TL1	GR831 standard
JDBC	1.1 & 2.0
Java RMI	1.0
CORBA	2.3
HTTP	1.0, 1.1
JSP	1.1
Servlets	2.2
XML	1.0

System Requirements
Hardware Requirements
Processor Speed	400-500 MHz
Memory	128 MB RAM or higher
Hard Drive Space	75 MB
Software Requirements
Supported Platforms	Windows (NT/2000/2003), Solaris, Linux, IBM AIX, HP-UX, and Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 2.1AS.
Java Version	JDK 1.6 and above.