Products Overview
ComponentSuite
FasTrack Conductor
Packet to OSI
SNMP Agent Gateway
TestSuite

Brochures &
White Papers

SNMP Agent Gateway

The simplicity and popularity of the SNMP protocol has made it one of the dominant management protocols for network management applications. At the same time, other standard protocols such as TL1 and CORBA still exist as well as numerous proprietary interfaces. To integrate these diverse network elements into the management system is time-consuming and costly.

To solve these problems, QCOM has developed an SNMP Agent Gateway, which functions as a gateway (or proxy) for these other protocols. The Agent converts SNMP operations such as GET and SET into the appropriate protocol requests for TL1, CORBA, etc. On the other hand, events sent by the southbound Agents are converted into SNMP Traps.

The following Gateways are supported:

• SNMP / TL1 Gateway (click for more information)
• SNMP / Proprietary Gateway (click for more information)

The architecture of the SNMP Agent Gateway is shown in Figure 1 below. Pre-built Adapters are provided for TL1. To handle CORBA or proprietary protocols, QCOM provides a generic Customizable Adapter, which the user can configure to handle their proprietary protocol. The Agent Gateway also functions as a Proxy Agent for existing SNMP Agents.

The actual Agents, with which the Agent Gateway would be communicating through the plug-in Adapters, would be residing inside a Managed Element, in most common scenarios. However, they can actually reside anywhere for all practical purposes.

Fig. 1: SNMP Agent Gateway Architecture Click to enlarge.

Because each Adapter actually is an SNMP Agent, the Adapters can be run on separate machines if desired. The Agent Gateway is capable of handling multiple Managed Elements. To simplify integration with the NMS/EMS, the Agent needs to be configured with multiple virtual IP addresses. The Gateway can function as a proxy for one or more SNMP Agents. This is necessary when integrating existing Agents available for MS-Windows or Solaris Operating Systems. The Gateway is configured to forward SNMP operations to the appropriate SNMP Agent based on the OID. All of the responses are then collected into a single SNMP response. SNMP Traps received from other Agents are forwarded. The Agent can be configured to be part of multiple SNMP Communities each with their own access privileges (read-only or read-write). The Agent can be configured to send SNMP Traps to one or more destinations. Each destination has a configurable Community name. 100% Java; Any Java-enabled platform supported.