By allowing the NMS to manipulate and process management details provided by data acquisition tools, adding functionality to the environment is usually just a matter of adding a new tool. This paper outlines the tool based methodology and how it has been implemented within the Minerva Network Management Environment. The protocol used for integration of external tools will be covered in detail. The framework designed to incorporate tool generated data will also be outlined. This is a basic fact of life as no NMS vendor can foresee or justify supporting every possible network environment.
Lets outline a simple example.
A typical university environment will have a mixture of various types of machines. Another common situation is the need to monitor applications running on a UNIX machine. In an SNMP world, checking the status of a process would require the development of a custom SNMP agent. This isn't a job for the feint hearted. In a world without SNMP, the system administrator would probably just write a shell script to grep through the output of the ps command to see if the process was still running.