Tuesday, November 07, 2006

eDeveloper and SNMP: Part Two – Making it Happen

Using eDeveloper and SNMP
eDeveloper applications and various components or modules can send trap messages to a pre-configured Network Management Station (NMS), also referred to as an SNMP monitor, which lets the system administrator query and control the eDeveloper application or module when alarms, failures, or other exceptional events occur.

The SNMP DLL
Needless to say, the SNMP agent must be present on the operating system and the eDeveloper SNMP extension, the Mgsnmp.dll file, must be placed in the eDeveloper root during installation.

The MIB files
eDeveloper supplies two Management Information Base (MIB) files, Magic.mib and Magic_trap.mib. These are located in the eDeveloper Support directory. The MIB files are compiled according to the NMS version installed. You should copy the MIB files to the NMS server.

Overview of SNMP Use in Magic
You can set various values for the SNMP parameters, defined in the Mgreq.ini and Mgrb.ini files, to specify when the Magic Requester and Magic Requester Broker will send trap messages.

The SNMPNotify function is utilized to issue SNMP messages with the available parameters of message, severity.

When an alarm or error occurs outside of the application development process, SNMP trap messages are sent to the Network Management Station (NMS).

Examples of the types of trap messages sent are:

  • A thread crash or fatal error of eDeveloper or the eDeveloper gateway.
  • Termination due to the license limit.
  • Unable to connect to a specified DBMS.
  • Database connection threshold exceeded.
  • An enterprise server was stopped and started. The trap message contains the address of the enterprise server.
  • An enterprise server aborted its connection to the Magic Request Broker. The trap message contains the address of the enterprise server.

    Anyway, this is an overview of SNMP and eDeveloper. If you are not familiar with SNMP applications, such as IBM Tivoli, then some of this discussion may seem like a foreign language discussion. For more information on SNMP, try the official Internet Engineering Task Force website for official information contained in the Request for Comments (RFC) documents. But for those familiar with SNMP for application monitoring, you can see from this overview that eDeveloper "plays well" with SNMP application monitors and other SNMP oriented software.
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