12.5.2.1 Central and Remote Administration

Overview

Before we proceed to understand how to administer the resources, it is imperative that we understand how the distributed setup is designed to meet the remote management challenges. The Web NMS distributed setup enables you to manage remote sites that are geographically very much apart, from a single console. The following sequence of actions take place in the distributed setup:

Light-weight Distributed Mediation Servers are installed in the remote networks where resources are to be monitored.
Distributed Mediation Servers discover the network resources and collect their performance data.
Distributed Mediation Servers then send the data at periodic intervals to the Central Server with which it is registered.
Users connect their clients to the Central Server to see the performance of their networks and resources.
Administrators in the remote sites can perform the required configurations from the client UI.
Administrator in the central site can perform the required configurations globally, i.e., for all the remote probes through the client UI.

Central Server versus Distributed Mediation Server

The two main components in the distributed setup are the Central server and the Distributed Mediation server. Both these servers are developed from the same framework with only the required changes done during installation. The following are the major differences in the functionality of the two servers:

Central Server

Distributed Mediation Server

Global view - you can view all the networks monitored by all the Distributed Mediation Servers in various regions.
Access to the device information stored across all distributed servers.
Create/modify/delete users with various permissions from a single console at runtime.
Before the Distributed Mediation Server is installed, add it from the Client UI and make the required configurations. The configurations will take effect once the Distributed Mediation Server starts. Configuration changes for all the Distributed Mediation Servers can be effected at runtime using the Runtime Administration Tool (from menubar, invoke Tools>Runtime Administration).
All client-facing tasks are performed.
Stores all the collected data of all the DMS registered with it, in its own database. The data in the Central DB is displayed in the Client.

Region-specific view of data.
Access to the data specific to that Distributed Mediation Server.
Create/modify/delete users with various permissions specific to the Distributed Mediation Server domain.
Configuration changes can be made at runtime for a specific server alone.
Only region-specific network-facing tasks are performed.
Stores all the collected data in its own database and sends the data to the Central Server database..