SNMP Research International, Inc.

Secure Your Network

Additional Information

The Service Monitor is available with CIAgent.

Related Products

Service Monitor Agent

Service Monitor agent is designed to determine if a service, such as file transfer, email, or Web page access, is working properly and whether response time is within acceptable parameters. Management applications may initiate Service Monitor response-time measurements from several different points of view, and then collect and analyze the measurements at a central location. For example, the response time of Web site access from users in several different countries may be analyzed and compared.

The Service Monitor agent can also perform basic network checks including Ping, TraceRoute, and NSLookup.

Contents

Overview

SNMP has traditionally been used primarily for management of the networking infrastructure but is increasingly being used for management of both systems and applications running on those systems. Service Monitor is especially useful to monitor services on separate LANs. For example, even when the response time of a Web service is within acceptable parameters with a given network, the response time may vary drastically between other LANs using the same service. System and Network Administrators can use Service Monitor to proactively monitor services from multiple points of presence, and relay that information to a Central Network Management System (NMS).

Architecture

The following diagram illustrates how Service Monitor interacts with the CIAgent® Master Agent.

service monitor architecture

Operation

Service Monitor is implemented as a dynamic subagent that automatically connects to the CIAgent Master Agent when installed on the server. Only servers that are to be used as measurement points need to have the Service Monitor subagent installed.

The following diagram illustrates how Service Monitor may be used to measure the performance of a Web server from different user's perspectives.

service monitor operation

Service Monitor Operation

First, each Service Monitor is configured to send service requests at specified time intervals. The response time measurements are then stored locally by the agent. If desired, Service Monitor will compare each measurement to a threshold value, and send a notification to the NMS if the value exceeds the threshold value. Service Monitor can also send a notification if the request failed. The NMS may query Service Monitor, using standard SNMP get requests, to retrieve the values for the response-time measurements.

For example, the California LAN Service Monitor sends an HTTP request to the Web site www.myfavoritestore.com. The response to this request takes 380 milliseconds. Since the response-time threshold was set to 250 ms, Service Monitor will send an SNMP notification to the NMS.

Similarly, the Atlantic Coast LAN Service Monitor sends an HTTP request to www.myfavoritestore.com. In this case, it only takes 25 milliseconds to get a response, which is within the desired performance range, so no notification is sent.

The NMS may request stored measurement values from each Service Monitor by using standard SNMP get requests. This data may be analyzed, correlated, and presented by management applications for reporting, trend analysis, or troubleshooting.

Packaging

The Service Monitor is licensed in binary and only runs in conjunction with CIAgent. It can be purchased and added to the system at any time after CIAgent is installed.

Available Platforms

Service Monitor is supported on a the following platforms.

If a particular system is not listed, please contact Sales. We are happy to work with customers to port our products to new systems.

Please note: When a product is licensed, the product will support one platform of your choosing. If you need a product to run on two or more platforms, then a separate license must be acquired for each platform.

Sales Inquiries

For more information, please call +1 865 579-3311, or send email to info@snmp.com. You can also fill out a Sales Query and one of our sales people will respond to your request quickly.

Licensing terms are available from info@snmp.com.