I have been thinking about some use cases in telecommunication or VOIP network which can be used by CAPS or OpenESB recently. It is a very thing if two types of applications can be merged and integrated together. I worked for telecommunication and VOIP network for years. Based on my experience, it seems that we can do lots. Even I have been thinking that we may recreate billing system based on CAPS and OpenESB technologies. But it is not easy to get some concrete use cases if you leave that domain for that long. I need to refresh my memory. One that I am interested is SNMP. I am writting down thoughts which can be discussed in detail later.
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an industry standard for network management. The SNMP network consists of managed devices, managers and agents. A managed device is a network node which contains an SNMP agent resides in a managed network.
The managed devices collect and store management information which is accessible from SNMP managers. The managed devices can be routers, access servers, switches, bridges, hubs, computer hosts, etc. The managed devices can be hardware or software components. An agent is an SNMP module that resides in a managed device. The agent has local information about the managed device. A manager is an SNMP module that monitor and control managed devices via using SNMP commands, for instance, GET, GET-NEXT, GET-RESPONSE, SET and TRAP. (note: TRAP is a special command which is sent asynchronously by a agent to manager as some event reporting). Both the manager and agent use a management information base (MIB) to define and collect information on managed devices.
As we know that Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (CAPS) is J2EE-based enterprise integration suite which is used to develop and deploy SOA platform. And the Open ESB is to implement an enterprise service bus (ESB) runtime using Java Business Integration which allows you to easily integrate enterprise applications and web services.
The question is that how CAPS and OpenESB can be fitted into SNMP network?
CAPS already offers SNMP agent eWay to allow you to forward CAPS alerts to the third-party SNMP management system. All CAPS’ modules, for instance, Integration Servers, Messaging Servers, eWays, Collaborations, can be monitored and controlled. You can use the CAPS SNMP agent to get a list of properties of CAPS application servers and project components and start/stop/restart project components.
If CAPS provides SNMP manager eWay, many existing agents or legacy agents can be managed and monitored through SNMP GET and SET protocols. More complicated applications can be created using web services or collaborations which are provided by CAPS. CAPS needs to provide a way to import the SNMP agent MIB.
SNMP BC can be added into OpenESB, SNMP BC can be acting a SNMP agent or SNMP manager, just like what CAPS does. But acting as a SNMP manager will be more useful for telecommunication or VOIP network and the SNMP manager BC will be used for managing and controlling agents which are running on the SNMP network. All the controlling and managing functionality can be done by business process.