Understanding the network.pdf - Back to Home

Spectrum is available in both UNIX and Windows NT versions. Cabletron also
markets a "management console" package called Spectrum Element
Manager, which provides a decent "laptop" SNMP and RMON management
console. Information on Spectrum is available at
http://www.spectrummgmt.com.
• Castle Rock's SNMPc—This package is a Windows-based SNMP management
suite. The management server and console both operate on Windows NT and
provide support for RMON I, and integrated email and paging notification. It
comes in both enterprise and workgroup versions. SNMPc is also part of the
CiscoWorks for Windows management system for Cisco routers and switch
products. CiscoWorks provides configuration, real-time monitoring, and
topology mapping services. CiscoWorks for Windows comes with SNMPc. The
package, however, can also interoperate with OpenView for Windows.
Information on SNMPc is available at http://www.castlerock.com.
This is by no means an extensive list of the commercial SNMP and network
management products on the market. There are a large number of network
management firms marketing SNMP development tools, network probes, and MIBs.
A number of public license and shareware tools are also available on the Web. Here
are a few of the most useful and reliable:
• MRTG (Multi-Router Traffic Grapher)—This is a must-have tool for doing
traffic flow monitoring on routers, switches, bridges, and servers; anything
that supports SNMP MIB-2 can be monitored with this tool. It was created by
Tobias Oetiker and Dave Rand and is available for UNIX and Windows NT.
The tool is basically a Perl script that polls SNMP-aware devices and
constructs a graphical representation of the traffic flow on the
devices'interfaces based on the data it collects. These graphs are then
formatted into HTML pages that can be made available with any HTTP server.
MRTG is available at
http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/mrtg.html.
• Scotty—Scotty is a TCL-based SNMP network development environment
built on top of the Tool Command Language (TCL). Scotty has two
components: the TNC Tcl extension, which is used to access management
objects and develop SNMP management scripts, and Tkined, which is a
graphical network editor that can develop network topology maps and
provide visual displays for SNMP alarm events. Scotty is a tool that is
definitely oriented toward people with programming experience. It is
dependent on TCL and TK (the TCL graphics element) and runs and compiles
on most popular UNIX systems. Scotty is available at
http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~schoenw/scotty.
• SNMP Watcher—This is a Macintosh-based SNMP management console. It is
available at http://www.dartmouth.edu/netsoftware/snmpwatcher.
• SMAP—SMAP is a Macintosh SNMP graphing tool. It supports dynamic node
discovery and provides graphical traffic and device status visualization. It