Overview of AdventNet Agent Toolkit Java Edition

To collect management information from device or application, you need an interface called agent to communicate to them and retrieve information. At situations of large networks, managing devices or applications and retrieving information becomes complex. The AdventNet Agent toolkit generates the agent framework that is capable of managing any number of devices or applications in the network.

Moreover, most of the management systems are built from top to bottom either by SNMP, TL1 or HTTP. The Agent Toolkit is a development tool used for building Java based standalone SNMP, Multi-protocol (that includes SNMP, CORBA, RMI, HTTP, and TL1), and standalone TL1 agents. It consist of comprehensive suite of Java based cross platform development tools, framework, and APIs to be used across many operating systems, thus addressing the needs of fast paced environment for developing application/system management agents.

Few Key Features are:

• Open Standards: Agent Toolkit Java Edition is built on standard technologies like JMX, Java Beans, XML, JFC, JDBC, HTTP, RMI, CORBA, SNMP, TL1, etc. Given the power and ease-of-use of these new Internet technologies, developers can now provide better solutions faster and at a lower cost of ownership including lower cost of development than before.
• Cross Platform
• Solaris, Windows NT/2000, and LINUX supported out-of-the-box.
• Management Protocols.
• Development and test tools: Agent Toolkit Java Edition provides comprehensive set of UI (editors, compilers and browsers) and command line tools for easy and faster development and testing of agents.

With the different agents supported, let us see an overview of how Agent Toolkit is used to develop Multi-Protocol agents. These agents provide multi-protocol access to common management information through adaptors or connectors for various protocols such as SNMP, RMI, HTTP, CORBA, HTML, and TL1. You just have to instrument once to access with any protocol. You can also create your own custom protocol adaptors and plug them into the multi-protocol agent architecture.

Multi-Protocol agent architecture comprises of the following components:

• Instrumentation Level: The agent instrumentation is done here and made it available as Java components called MBeans. MBeans encapsulate manageable objects as attributes and operations and exposes them to management applications.
• Agent Level: The manager requests are received and processed here. This level handles the different protocols and converts manager requests into the common protocol independent instrumentation provided by MBeans. The task of converting from specific protocols is done by protocol-specific adaptors/connectors. These interface with a common MBean server, which controls and interacts with the MBeans.
• Connector Level (Adaptor): Adaptors and connectors are protocol handlers, which expose MBeans information to their respective protocol clients/managers. An agent may contain any number of connectors or protocol adaptors.

The Multi-Protocol architecture is applicable to network management, remote system maintenance, application provisioning, and the new management needs of the service-based network.