Understanding Server Management

The Management Agent for NetWare and the Management Agent for Windows NT include features that offer benefits over server management functionality included with NetWare and Windows NT server software.

This section includes the following topics:

• SNMP-Based Server Management
• SNMP Agent Functions

SNMP-Based Server Management

The main advantage of the Management Agent for NetWare and Management Agent for Windows NT is that they support the industry standard Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). SNMP is the protocol governing network management and the monitoring of network devices and their functions.

The ZfS SNMP agents support UDP/IP, IPX^TM, and NCP implementations for accepting and sending packets (datagrams). This standard mechanism allows any SNMP console or manager to request information from the ZfS Server Management SNMP agents. An SNMP console can be any console that supports SNMP; the ZfS ConsoleOne fully supports SNMP v.1 communication.

SNMP Agents

The ZfS server management SNMP agents run on NetWare and Windows NT servers in your network. The agents monitor servers, collecting historical data and dynamic data in response to requests from ConsoleOne. An administrator at the ZfS ConsoleOne can request data simply by clicking a representative icon for any device, operating system, or service discovered on a server.

The following figure illustrates an internetwork using the Management Agent for NetWare and Management Agent for Windows NT and the ZfS ConsoleOne.

SNMP Agent Functions

The functionality of the Management Agent for NetWare and Management Agent for Windows NT (the Novell SNMP-based agents for NetWare and Windows NT servers) can be divided into the following areas:

• Collecting Statistics
  • Monitoring: Server monitoring provides instant information about various monitored elements of the server, such as CPU utilization, memory size, cache buffers, connected users, volumes, disks, disk space usage per user, network adapters, print queues, print jobs, and loaded NetWare Loadable Module^TM (NLM^TM) files on NetWare or Windows NT servers.
  • Trending: Trends provide historical data about various server objects and can be displayed in a diagram on the SNMP console. Trends are stored at the server side, which eliminates the need for continuous polling from an SNMP manager, and this data can be accessed via SNMP by any ZfS ConsoleOne or other SNMP-based console.

• Alarm Notification: More than 580 different types of alarms or events (SNMP traps) can be sent from any NetWare server to the ZfS management system or to any other SNMP-based console.

  Any Windows NT system, security, or application event is converted to an SNMP trap and sent to the ZfS management system or to any other SNMP-based console.

  The alarms inform the administrator about events that have occurred or thresholds which have been crossed.

• Configuration Management: The Management Agent for NetWare enables network administrators to remotely configure NetWare servers. There are 187 SET parameters on the NetWare server that can be used to tune the server's performance. Administrators can view settings and change all parameters from any ZfS ConsoleOne.

The SNMP agents must be installed on any server that you want to manage. For information on installing the SNMP agents, or if you have already installed the agent software to servers that you want to manage, see Installing and Setting Up Management and Monitoring Services in the Installation guide.