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Sun Management Center

Traditional SNMP agents specifically the ones mostly running on a device come alive as monoliths when those systems are started. This design model does not suit a system which is capable of taking different colors by hour of the day, for example, a system can be running customer applications during normal business hours, backup during late night hours and may be acting as an LDAP server all through the day. The problem in traditional model is worked around by creating subagents for each application requiring management control and then hooking those sub-agents up to a master agent running on that system or on some other systems. The pitfalls there are that multiple process are running on a system, one for each application in the worst case. If this is allowed to proliferate every application that wants to expose management interfaces will have a subagent reporting into a master agent eating up precious system/ network resources which can be otherwise utilized for a better cause. Given instrumentation comes alive and goes away in an agent running on an OS, agents must have the intelligence to start and stop monitoring of an application depending upon what the system looks like at that point in time.

Inside Sun Management Center (SunMC) Agent a collection of related instrumentation is represented as a module. A SunMC module is a manageable entity which can be controlled via the user interface in a standard manner. The agent at any given point in time is the sum total of all loaded modules. This unlike traditional SNMP agents where the entire instrumentation comes alive in all its glory at boot time. Beyond boot time in some other agents, quirks to add/delete instrumentation include sending SIGHUP to reload definitions and load or unload instrumentation which by the way requires local presence. In case of SunMC this can be done from remote using one of the several interface available for performing such operations.

SunMC modules can be single or multi-instance. A single instance module can only be loaded once on an agent. For example, Hardware monitoring module instrumenting hardware on which the agent is running represents single instance SunMC module bucket. For certain other SunMC modules multiple instances can be loaded in an agent at a given point in time. These mostly represent the business application monitoring modules. They come in handy when multiple similar applications are running on a system and they all require separate management control. Some examples of multi-instance SunMC module are modules to monitor related set of process, scanning of any file for scan patterns specific to an application etc.. The creation and deletion of portions of MIB instrumentation via module load unload is further fine tuned by scheduling of module load/unload and enable/disable operations on the agent.

The power to choose is clearly in the hands of system administrator here. Sun Management Center agent plays the role of a good citizen in the management space where we see similar management agentry chewing up CPU, Memory and disk space liberarlly.

(http://www.sun.com/sunmanagementcenter)

Posted at 01:50AM May 10, 2006 by adikhit in SNMP  |