Network management for next to nothing

Plumbers don't throw out the 50-year-old copper pipes every time they spring a leak; they plug the hole. As caretakers of the network plumbing, network professionals also face problems that need reliable and inexpensive fixes.

That's where network management software is supposed to help. "You go to the big guys and they want thousands [of dollars] per user with thousands per year in maintenance," says Ralph Mackiewicz, vice president of marketing at Sisco, an integration software provider in Sterling Heights, Mich. He says his company doesn't purchase much network management software because that "kind of application takes a lot of effort to use effectively with a [return on investment] that isn't significant enough" to justify the cost.

But there is hope. Many management developers and vendors make their software and applications available for free or a fairly low price. Network World has reported several tools to readers in past articles (see this article), but there are some new tools that have come to the forefront.

For example, Greg Lamoree, Web project leader at Buckeye Pipe Line, a Pennsylvania petroleum provider, developed his own tools, Third Watch Server Monitor and Monster Ping, and started his own company, Random Minds, to distribute them to other users.

He needed certain features that smaller programs, such as ping and traceroute, couldn't deliver but he didn't need all the features offered in products from companies such as Computer Associates, Tivoli and BMC. And he couldn't justify spending the money on software from those larger network management vendors, noting that even so-called point products can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

"In a lot of cases, we just care if it's up or down," Lamoree says. "I know I can't spend my life looking at pages and pages of data to figure out what's working and when."

He built "several little applications" that performed tasks such as ping and traceroute simultaneously and in real time. "I wanted to make something that only required setting two options to get this information," he adds. Lamoree charges for his work, but many products are free, such as:

Loriot

Loriot is a free network node manager for Windows operating systems. Designed by a private French developer, Lecointe Ludovic, the program is said to manage SNMP, Internet Control Message Protocol devices and other processes from small and large networks. The software can manage hosts, routers, links - any SNMP devices in your LAN, WAN or metropolitan-area network, Ludovic says on his Web site. The software performs network discovery, supports plug-ins and includes an HTTP daemon module. The plug-ins let Loriot pull information from other network management systems and the HTTP module lets users access Loriot from any console on the network. Loriot also works with existing network management systems and can reroute local events such as SNMP traps to a master Loriot console.

Net-snmp

Developers from the University of California at Davis created net-snmp (formerly known as ucd-snmp) and offer the package for free. Net-snmp is a set of software tools that deal specifically with the SNMP protocol and managing SNMP devices. The toolkit provides a suite of command-line applications that can be used to query and act on remote SNMP agents. Users can pull information, such as device availability, throughput and network latency, from the devices that could help them enhance network performance.

The software can also be configured to query and act on remote SNMP agents, automating some corrective actions and improving performance. Net-snmp also provides tools and libraries relating to SNMP, including an extensible agent, an SNMP library, tools to request from or send information to SNMP agents, and tools to generate and handle SNMP traps.

Sec

Private developer Risto Vaarandi developed sec, an event correlator, to manage network devices as well as applications, but he claims on the software's Web site that sec can be used to solve any other task where event correlation can improve performance. Sec is a free, platform-independent, event-correlation tool. Sec compares the predefined rules with the performance of the network to determine where performance may be degrading. Any instances that differ are then correlated according to the rules in a predefined configuration file, and acted upon by executing user-specified commands. Sec can be integrated with other network management tools and performs several automated functions as defined by the user.

SHAMAN

The University of Delaware is responsible for this free tool. SHAMAN, which stands for Spreadsheet-based Hierarchical Architecture for Management, is software designed to provide network management by distributing management functions based on the nature and urgency of the task. The software can be preconfigured to perform routine duties while the network manager addresses more critical jobs. Network managers program the software, or "intermediate manager," using a scripting Management Information Base and a language designed to address SNMP management to take automated corrective action for certain network events. The intermediate manager receives scripts, interprets the scripts, sends commands to agents and receives data from the agents. SHAMAN then processes the data and generates event reports as defined in the scripts. It also includes a graphical user interface that can be used by a manager to construct, load and execute scripts in an intermediate manager.

Contact Staff Writer Denise Dubie

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