See Related Blogs in the Gateway Series:

NETeXPERT Gateways 101: What are Gateways?

NETeXPERT Gateways 102: How are they used? and

NETeXPERT Gateways 103: How do they work?

The following figure outlines the key components of the Generic Gateway (GG) with interchangeable protocol agents which can be plugged into the gateway.

• Protocol Agents include communication to TCP/IP, Telnet, Database (SQL), X.25, and Serial (RS232).
• The Protocol Agent translates the specific protocol into ASCII for the Identification and Parse Rules to normalize the data into events and attributes.
• Gateway Analysis rules are available for processing of the data whether for performance thresholding and/or fault analysis, suppression, and correlation. Gateway Analysis rules can also be used to enrich discovered information.
• Dialog state commands and responses provide the basic tools for automating intelligent commands and responses to resources for data collection, activation, and discovery.

The gateway is a reusable process. The process is customized for a particular function by adding rules and dialogs through custom business logic editors (Rule and Dialog Editor).

Figure 3: Generic Gateway and Protocol Agents

SNMP Gateway

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Gateway is one of the most widely leveraged gateways due to the wide-spread use of SNMP in managing routers, soft-switches, servers, and next generation equipment. The SNMP Gateway is leveraged by nearly all customers who have NETEXPERT in production. The SNMP Gateway is the foundation for IP fault, performance, activation, discovery, and also service management.

The SNMP Gateway is built upon the Generic Gateway in that the Gateway Analysis rules are available for intelligent processing and enrichment of the SNMP collected data.

• The SNMP Gateway interface definition leverages MIB II and any vendor Enterprise Specific MIB (ASN.1 data structure defining the traps, and table structure which resides within an SNMP agent). Once the MIB is loaded into the gateway the gateway can receive traps and Get/Set table attributes within an SNMP agent.
• When a SNMP Trap is received it is pre-normalized for the user. No Idenfication and Parse rules are required because SNMP’s trap structure (which includes ASN.1 attribute varbinds) are normalized by the gateway automatically.
• SNMP Analysis rules can then analyze the SNMP trap attributes and also execute SNMP Get/Set commands to get SNMP Tables from the SNMP agent. All Gateway Analysis rules found in the generic gateway are also available in the SNMP Gateway.

Figure 4: SNMP Gateway

See Related Blogs in the Gateway Series:

NETeXPERT Gateways 101: What are Gateways?

NETeXPERT Gateways 102: How are they used? and

NETeXPERT Gateways 103: How do they work?

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