This intelligent SNMP agent is comprised of the EMANATE® Master Agent, multiple extensions for systems and applications management, and an optional subagent development kit for building customized extensions. CIAgent supports SNMPv1, SNMPv2, and SNMPv3 transactions. CIAgent helps detect, analyze, and resolve problems before customers and users notice a service outage. In addition, the CIAgent's standards-based approach leverages existing investments in open system and network monitoring tools, thus lowering the total cost of ownership. For instance, integrated Network Node Manager applications that access information are bundled with each CIAgent product.

CIAgent uses the Simple Network Management Protocol, SNMP, which is the de facto standard for the management of network devices. In addition, the use of SNMP to support systems and applications management is growing. System administrators want a seamless top-to-bottom and end-to-end view of the activities occurring on their network. They want to correlate network, system, or applications outages with the loss of service availability to users. Using multiple management paradigms makes this difficult task even harder. Using a single management framework, SNMP, to manage networks, systems, and applications makes it easier to gain a single view of all activity.

The CIAgent can be used in the following ways:

• When an important application dies the Critical Application Monitor carries out suitable actions such as sending a trap or restarting the application.

• Searching for specifically defined patterns in system log files and when these patterns are detected the Log File Monitor performs corrective actions.

• Watching each of the systems file systems is accomplished through the File System Monitor, which then notifies the manager when the file system approaches capacity. It can perform actions based on certain file system problems through programs, or scripts, or traps.

• Service Monitoring is an optional CIAgent Subagent which monitors services such as a web server, FTP server, or SMTP server and reports if it is working properly.

• A Web interface is available through the DR-Web Extensible Agent features within CIAgent so that Web browsers can view CIAgent's information.

• System Application (RFC 2287) supports configuration, fault detection, performance monitoring, and control of application software.

• Useful information about systems and the applications running on those systems comes through the Host Resources MIB (RFC 1514).

• Reduce traffic on your networks wide area network links by using the Mid-Level Manager by shifting the continual polling of local systems from the enterprise manager to a local machine which uses scripts.

• Event MIB uses the alarm and event tables from the RMON MIB to configure traps when unusual events or patterns are recorded.

• Remote Operations performs ping and traceroute operations from a remote host.

• Build a smooth co-existence path for other SNMP Agents through the Native Agent Adapters.

• Alias MIB allows the CIAgent to resemble another vendor's overlapping MIB module, so that existing management applications can be used without modification.

• Trapsend supports SNMPv1, SNMPv2, and SNMPv3 traps sending functions from the command-line.

CIAgent is available on Solaris, HP/UX, Linux, and Windows NT.

SNMP Research International produces a complete family of management products based on SNMPv1, SNMPv2, SNMPv3, and other protocols for agents, management stations, Web-based management, and mid-level managers. These products form the basis of many of today's SNMP products offered by leading networking companies. The founder of SNMP Research, Dr. Jeff Case, has long been a contributor in the area of SNMP and has authored or co-authored many standards documents and articles on the topic. As a result of his efforts, SNMP Research is a leader with respect to defining the standards and constructing implementations based on SNMP, the standard protocol for TCP/IP management.