ISPPlanet NMS Series - Castle Rock SNMPc

Installation and Setup
Architecturally, SNMPc consists of separate polling, database server, and console components that enable scalable distributed management with shared remote access. But this architecture is only fully-realized in the $4K Enterprise Edition with Remote Extension. To stay under our series price cap, we evaluated the SNMPc Workgroup Edition ($895). This pared-down version includes one poller, server, and console, running together on a single Windows 98/NT/2000 platform. Several Enterprise features have been trimmed from the Workgroup Edition, but one big difference is scale: the Enterprise Edition can handle up to 25,000 devices, while the Workgroup Edition tops out at 1000. According to Castle Rock, the Workgroup Edition handles up to 50 polls per second, making it suitable for small-to-midsize networks.

We used Castle Rock's wizard to install SNMPc Workgroup Edition 5.0.9d on a PIII 500 running Windows NT4 SP5. Before installing SNMPc, we spent 30 minutes configuring Air Media's Notify!Connect v3.03.11. Included with SNMPc, Notify!Connect forwards alphanumeric alerts to pagers, cell phones, and PDAs using TAP or DTMF services (right).

After we tested Notify!Connect, installing SNMPc from the 5.0 CD and 5.0.9d patch file took just a few minutes. A setup wizard requests the usual information, plus a discovery seed—the IP address and community string of a nearby router. Following reboot, SNMPc runs as several tasks (left). Although SNMPc cannot operate as an NT service, it can be launched from the Startup folder and run in the background, without an active console.

By default, SNMPc defines a pair of unprotected user accounts (right). Your first order of business is therefore to log in and add passwords. You may also create additional accounts with unique access level, email, pager, and schedule parameters used by SNMPc to forward alerts. Each user's "Real Name" and pager type must match values configured into Notify!Connect. Don't confuse SNMPc Groups with Notify!Connect Groups. Use SNMPc Groups to email or page (a set of) SNMPc user accounts. Use Notify!Connect Groups to page several devices at once (e.g., ring both the Administrator's cell phone and pager).

SNMPc maintains just one active database, created during installation. Backup and Restore functions (left) allow the active database to be archived on demand or on a schedule. The active database can be reinitialized using the Reset function. This scheme makes it easy to start fresh or fallback to an earlier snapshot.