1.1 Licensing

SunNet Manger is a licensed product. You need a password for each machine on which it is installed. You can obtain a license password from the license distribution center for your region or country. See your Installation Guide for the addresses and phone numbers of license distribution centers.

1.2 Site and Domain Differences

Solstice Site Manager has a license restriction of 100 nodes and includes the sender portion of Cooperative Consoles. The sender portion allows management data (topology, events, and traps) to be forwarded to Domain Manager. All other features of the current release are included in Site Manager. The SNM proxy agent does remote polling and sends the data back to the console using RPC.

Solstice Domain Manager is typically used to manage large site or multi-site networks. Up to 10,000 nodes can be managed, and the sender and receiver portions of Cooperative Consoles are included. In addition to the full suite of SunNet Manager tools, including remote polling by the SNMP proxy agent, Domain Manager can use more than 300 partner applications to augment network management and data analysis.

1.3 Management Applications and Agents

The SunNet Manager product provides both management applications and agent software. You install the SunNet Manager software on the system from which you will manage the network--this system is known as the management station. Management applications are the processes that allow you to initiate management tasks and collect management information. Agents are processes that access the device or element being managed at the request of a management application.

Most agents that are provided with SunNet Manager return information about entities on the Sun workstation on which the agent software is installed. A second type of agent, a proxy agent, provides information about entities on other systems or other vendors' devices. Each agent returns a certain set of information or attributes to the management application. For example, the hostmem agent returns information about memory usage on the system on which the agent is installed. The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) proxy agent returns information about SNMP objects on any device that supports the SNMP standard.

Proxy agents provide two main advantages:

• They allow the management application to manage objects using virtually any protocol. SunNet Manager agents and proxy agents communicate with the management applications through the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol. Proxy agents translate the RPC protocol into the protocol that the managed objects understand. This is illustrated in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1

• A single proxy agent can provide management access to multiple devices. The management application only needs to communicate with one proxy agent to manage many devices. The real advantage of this becomes apparent when the proxy agent is installed in a different subnet or domain from the management application. The proxy agent handles the low-level gathering of data from the managed objects. Only minimal network traffic containing the relevant management information passes between the proxy agent and the management application. This is illustrated in Figure 1-2.

Figure 1-2

The SunNet Manager package includes a collection of agents and proxy agents. For a list of SunNet Manager agents and brief descriptions of the data they return, see "Part 2: Reference."

1.4 SunNet Manager Console

The SunNet Manager Console is the central management application in the SunNet Manager package. The Console is a graphically-oriented interface that allows you to create a representation of your network. You can use the Console to initiate management tasks and display management information. Figure 1-3 shows some examples of Console functions.

Figure 1-3

The Console provides mechanisms to initiate requests to agents for data reporting and for specifying events.

Data reporting allows you to direct agents to send reports of management data on a periodic basis. For example, you can direct the hostperf agent to return at one-hour intervals the percentage of CPU being used on a particular system. You can choose to have the reported data displayed in a log, in a chart or graph, or stored in a disk file.

SunNet Manager provides additional tools for viewing and analyzing the returned data: the Results Browser allows you to analyze data that has been stored to a disk file, while the Results Grapher allows you to see a graphical representation of either incoming data or stored data.

Event reporting allows you to direct agents to send reports of management data when an event takes place in the network. An event is an occurrence of certain user-defined conditions. For example, you can direct the hostperf agent to send a report whenever the CPU percentage on a system exceeds a set number. You can choose to have the Console reflect the report of an event by visual or audible indicators, or have the report of an event automatically launch a predefined program.

1.5 Management Database

The Console and other management applications rely on a management database (MDB) that contains definitions of the elements being managed, the agents that are available, and the requests that have been made to agents. The management database contains:

• Definitions of each type of element that can be represented in the SNM Console. This element type definition specifies the name of the element type (for example, ss10 for a SPARCstation 10) and the glyph (or icon) associated with it. The elements.schema file provided with SunNet Manager defines many general element types.

  The elements.schema file is located in the struct directory. (The default path for this directory is /usr/snm/struct for the Solaris 1.1.1 version of SNM, or /opt/SUNWconn/snm/struct for the Solaris 2.x version.) In addition, you can create your own element schema file that defines one or more element types.

• Definitions of instances of element types. The element instance definition represents a particular element in your network--usually the name of a device. An element instance also defines those agents that can be used to manage the element. In the Console, glyphs represent the instance definition

of each element. Element instance definitions can be created automatically by a management application such as the Discover Tool, or created "manually" using the Console's Edit >> Create function.

• Definitions of the agents that the management application can use to manage elements. Each agent can return different sets of information or attributes. The set of attributes that can be returned by each agent is defined in an agent schema file. At least one agent schema file should be installed on the management station for each agent that a management application will direct. (The SNMP proxy agent can be used with many agent schema files for different SNMP devices. Three SNMP schema files are included with SNM: snmp.schema, snmp-mibII.schema, and sun-snmp.schema.)

  Note that while technically all agents and schema files are available for any element instance, some agents are more appropriate for certain element types than others. A set of agent schema files are provided with SunNet Manager. The default location for these agent schema files is:

  · /usr/snm/agents, if you've installed the Solaris 1.1.1 version of SNM

  · /opt/SUNWconn/snm/agents, if you've installed the Solaris 2.x version of SNM

  The contents of the agent schema files are described in the man page for each agent.

• Definitions of predefined requests that you can invoke for a managed object in the Console. SNM has a set of predefined requests that cover a wide range of your information-gathering needs. These save you the trouble of building requests for individual elements. These requests are stored in $HOME/.SNMpredefined.

The management database present while you are running the Console--referred to as the runtime database--can be saved to an ASCII file and later reloaded into the Console. This feature allows you to save or backup your database--with any customizations you might have made--across system reboots. It also allows you the advantage of a portable database file. For example, you can manage multiple databases from the same Console or, within the same network, manage the elements in the same database from different machines.

1.6 Configuration

The two basic types of SunNet Manager configuration are:

• Configuration of the operation of the Console and SunNet Manager tools.

  You change values associated with these programs through the Props (Properties) button in the Console window. An example of this type of configuration is changing the way a glyph responds to an event from blinking (the default) to changing color. See Chapter 17, "Props Menu" in "Part 2: Reference" for a description of configurable properties.

• Configuration of certain operating characteristics of SunNet Manager agents and daemons on the system on which the agents and daemons are installed. Most network administrators do not need to perform this type of configuration.

  The characteristics of SNM agents and daemons are defined in the snm.conf file. For example, you can specify the locations of the log files generated by the SunNet Manager daemons. (The snm.conf file is located in the /etc directory if you've installed this product on a SunOS 4.x machine; if you've installed the Solaris 2.x version of this product, this file is located in /etc/opt/SUNWconn/snm.)

  Additionally, you can specify information relevant to the operation of the SNMP proxy agent, such as the location of SNMP schema files and the maximum number of requests that an SNMP proxy agent subprocess will handle. You can also specify security access for agents on the system where the snm.conf file resides. See the snm.conf (5) man page and the man pages for individual agents for more information. There is list of all the agents shipped with the current product in Table 2-1 in the next chapter.