Fault Management Solutions

In today's constantly changing IT landscape, applications and devices are tirelessly sending critical messages about things happenning right now on your network. These events contain information about things affecting your business, in real-time. It is crucial that your overall management solution have some sort of a network fault management component - a "Trap Manager" Service that will listen to these messages, filter out the noise and then notify you about the important events. Knowing about these events in real-time enables you to react to them in real-time! A proactive monitoring regimen can help prevent your network, your services, and even your business from being adversely affected. And this of course translates to money saved.

ByteSphere's Trap Manager Service (TMS) is a software component that passively watches your network for real-time events. It listens to alarms (SNMP Traps) from various agents and devices on the network, filters and forwards SNMP Traps, and notifies major stakeholders. ByteSphere Trap Receiver Service can be configured with comprehensive recognition, filtering, and notification mechanisms. TMS can receive alarms from any type of SNMP enabled device. As TMS receives SNMP traps, notifications, and informs, TMS can deduplicate the messages based on a variety of parameters. Then it can match based on the customizable filters or using the database and patent-pending MIBAcquire technology. Once the alarm is processed it can be passed through to the notifier if there is a filter match.

Due to popular demand, TMS was re-written to have a client/server architecture. This allows an unlimited number of TMS servers to be installed remotely on different network segments, while needing only one client to access them. TMS is also a windows service application, so if the server happens to go down or a user logs off, TMS will continue to run in the background, allowing for a potential 100% service uptime. OidView Fault Management module provides the user a Trap Console - an easy way to view traps, alarms, and faults on local or remote machines. Because TMS can run as a service, there is no need to administer the console locally, so an engineer can make changes or review alams remotely using the OidView Trap Manager console.

TMS is a fully featured network fault management solution that frees up time for the administrator - instead of creating custom filters or writing custom scripts, ByteSphere's TMS already has the majority of filters pre-created, out of the box. TMS supports a huge number of alarms and devices out of the box. ByteSphere has added support for over 11000 different events for hundreds of devices and vendors! Vendor support includes (but is not limited to)... Cisco, Juniper, Adtran, DELL, Nortel, etc.

The notifier module is an optional plug-in module that allows a user to be notified in a variety of ways, including sending a SMS message (using SMPP protocol) to your phone, EMAIL, sending messages to an alphanumeric PAGER (SNPP), executing an external program or script, writing to the NT Event Log, and sending an SNMP Trap.

After deduplicating and filtering traps, a variety of actions can be performed, including but not limited to:

• Ignore, Log, Delete
• Execute Programs or Scripts that can take corrective action
• Forward Trap to multiple hosts, including custom Varbinds if desired
• Send SMS messages to phones
• Send notifications via EMAIL
• Send messages to Pager
• Write to NT Event Log
• Sending a new Trap

OidView Trap Manager can be used to capture alarms from any number of notification sources (depending on your licensing option). This allows you to start small and purchase more IP license packs as your needs grow. It can capture alarms on a single network, from multiple networks, or it can be used to capture, filter, and forward from multiple networks using multiple nodes. It can filter and forward to other network management platforms (HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, or Micromuse Netcool, for example). It can forward traps globally or per matched filter. It can also forward the same alarm to more than one Network Manager, add varbinds, or send a new trap altogether. Also included in OidView Trap Manager is self-administrative technology that can automatically manage, clear, and delete alarms that are either too old or that go over a pre-set memory limit. For managers wishing to automate tasks, this feature is quite handy.