An Agent-Based Model of a Responsive Network Monitoring System

The widely used protocol based Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is today particularly limiting due to the client-server centralized and static paradigm. The approach is centralized as it relies on a limited set of capabilities at network nodes while management processing has to be performed at the network management station.In this paradigm, the system does not auto respond to changes and modifications in the network as hard coding is required to make the necessary changes making the system inflexible. In this book software agents are shown to collect and propagate statistics from different Points of Presence to the Network Operations Center; Update changes in the Network; process and present results. With the agent paradigm, the approach is able to increase system's responsiveness;increase system flexibility; take advantage of distributed computing resources, and to introduce interoperability, modularity and dynamism. This book describes the system architecture and implementation of the responsive model. The analysis is useful for IT professionals involved in monitoring and managing small and large networks who want to automate monitoring capabilities in their systems.