SmartMIB Professional Solution:

System Information and Reachability Management

(SM-Pro-SysGrpAvailability)

(SM-ProUpd-SysGrpAvailability)

(SM-ProPlus-SysGrpAvailability)

Solution Introduction & Details Overview:

This solution presentation focuses on  obtaining the System group information which are built into the operating systems of all network device types which are essential in Managing Telecom, Service Provider, and enterprise networks independent of the network size.

It introduces an SOSL based management script to build a management process of the System group information that uses the SNMP Protocol as an interface to retrieve/poll System related data. The System information that could be collected are information about the particular network device’s name, description, location, and the administrative contact(s).

The solution is equally focused on providing a measure of each of the managed element’s Reachability statistics. The measure is then provided through a special imbedded SOSL variable called sysAvailability.

As for the reachability data; it is part of the Availability management technology which gives a measure of the managed element’s Reachability statistics creating an overview of how well each element responds to queries and for which periods of time. Consequently; Availability management provides a eye on service continuity across the network as a whole or across a certain managed zone as well as on the specific element itself.

Since management traffic is the lowest priority processed traffic within the network; which means that management traffic is the first to be dropped whenever a link or a device are most likely overloaded by the very same traffic that is supposed to manage the network devices and resources! Actually in the midst of all of this, the priority (derived from importance and value) of the management traffic itself over other management traffic could finally be understood and evaluated as per the particular device SNMP based reachability statistics!

One interesting addition by this professional solution to network Reachability studies is that it views reachability from the network prospective and not from the NMS Station’s perspective alone! This is to say that Reachability is not about the ability of the NMS stations to reach the network elements or vice versa; but rather the ability of both the NMS station AND the network elements to reach other network elements. For this to happen; this solution learns all active IP addresses configured on each of the network elements and selectively performs a proxy ping from certain IP source addresses to other IP destinations on other elements across the network to verify reachability.

The question however still stands; which element should be tested for reachability to which other element ?

In answering this question; it is apparent that the network Topology have to be “Understood” by the NMS. This is to say that the NMS system needs to recognize Directly inter-connected devices from Indirectly connected ones across the whole network. The significance of this is that the operational status of directly connected devices suffices to determine basic reachability; hence proxy pings could be performed between the different Ethernet segments on managed elements across the overall topology.  

The solution presentation is based on the MIB-II which in turn is based on the IETF standard MIB RFC1213 which includes objects describing System information, interface details and related IP addresses. It also used the CISCO-PING MIB to perform the ping proxy.

General System Group Data Characteristics

The following table describes data that can be applied to System Group configuration management.

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