Question: What is SmartMIB and how is it different from other NMS Platforms particularity HPOV or an application like CiscoWorks ?

Answer:

It is a network management application used primarily top automate IP management information. It is based on NMS FCAPS industry framework added to it our own flavour of framework that we call IMMS.

It is also based on the NMS industry standard SNMP protocol and SMI. And supports many features and standards that such applications either doesn’t support or has limited supports.

For more information check our Competitive Analysis.

Question: What is the minimum hardware required to install SmartMIB application?

Answer:

The hardware requirements are really minimal compared to other NMS software vendor applications. This is due to the flexibility and control of overall handling of data whether it be collected from devices and/or inserted into the database. A typical and reasonable hardware configuration would be a Pentium 4 processor,

1 G of RAM and the same for the paging space.

Check Installation Pre-requisites for more details.

Question: What is SOS Language and why should I use it if I could write my own scripts using Perl or C or Java?

Answer:

It is a proprietary SNMP and MIB management centric language which will cater to the requirements of network management concepts without having to build complex programming schemes using Perl, C, or Java which are expensive to develop and to modify.

Its important to stress here that SOSL is NOT extensions based, as extensions have come short of catering to the Complex information manipulation required to handle SNMP retrieved information model! SOSL is its own SNMP language that sits on top of an SNMP OS Engine that parses and manages the SNMP PDUs.

Question: Can I have a say over which MIB Objects to poll and which to simply ignore?

Answer:

Yes. This is indeed one of the objectives of introducing SOSL. Simply modify the specified object(s) within the POLL function operation (or add a new function with desired objects). Of course, this is applicable to those scripts that are in write mode.

Question: How many Devices can SmartMIB manage? Is there any limit to this number?

Answer:

SmartMIB Has no limit on the number of devices or indeed the number of objects being polled. There is no hard coded limit of any number of devices. Hence the focus should be on how well the devices themselves could respond to polling and on how large would the SQL database grow.

Question: Could Reports be modified from defaults as management scripts are being modified?

Answer:

Yes. Any reporting tool could be used to read the specific database table generated by the application to generate customized reports and modify those reports. Our recommendation is the industry famous Crystal reports.

Question: As new MIBs are added continuously and older MIB objects get continuously modified; can I load MIBs into SmartMIB?

Answer:

No. Not at least in the normal since of ASN.1 syntax format MIB loading into NMS platforms. We believe that if the MIB object is of value to you in management then you should manually add that yourself as an administrator. You can however import MIB objects listed by names and corresponding Object Ids from a text file.

New MIB support is added under Processes Manu option-> Supported MIBs.