Patent ID: 7730174

Claim:
A method for agent-based monitoring of network devices, comprising: discovering, by a hardware processor in a computer, a plurality of network devices in a network, wherein each of the network devices discovered in the network include one or more Management Information Base (MIB) objects that identify a type and a plurality of hardware characteristics for the respective network device discovered in the network; transmitting a Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) request to each of the discovered network devices to obtain the Management Information Base (MIB) objects from each respective network device discovered in the network; loading, by the hardware processor in the computer, a plurality of agent templates corresponding to the discovered network devices, wherein: each of the agent templates comprise an agent construct that includes a class hierarchy having a plurality of class definitions, the plurality of class definitions in the class hierarchy comprise one or more parent classes that include the types for the discovered network devices, and the plurality of class definitions in the class hierarchy further comprise one or more child classes associated with the one or more parent classes, the one or more child classes including the plurality of hardware characteristics for the discovered network devices; selecting one of the discovered network devices as a network device to be monitored; selecting one of the plurality of agent templates based on the network device selected to be monitored; instantiating, by the computer, a plurality of agent objects from the class definitions for the selected one of the plurality of agent templates, wherein the plurality of instantiated agent objects correspond to the plurality of hardware characteristics for the selected network device, and wherein the plurality of instantiated agent objects monitor the plurality of hardware characteristics for the selected network device; retrieving, by the plurality of instantiated agent objects, information associated with each of the plurality of monitored hardware characteristics for the selected network device; comparing, by the plurality of instantiated agent objects, the retrieved information associated with each of the plurality of monitored hardware characteristics to a respective threshold value; and automatically communicating, by the computer, an alert to a user of the computer in response to the retrieved information for one or more of the monitored hardware characteristics violating the respective threshold value.