Monitoring network, bandwidth

[Jon Pinkley]

Paul,

I would be interested in the tools you have to collect data. Once you collect it, how are you using it?

Jon

P.S. is MohitAnchlia still reading this thread?

[Paul Beaudoin]

John,
It was a long journey; I started off building an automation layer (in DCL) for an old DEC product (NMCC) largely as it lacked any ability to 'autodiscover' (as it came to be known). This was mostly via DECnet phase IV using NCP commands then parsing out the responses and eventually placing it all in an RDB database. Once I hit about 30,000 lines it was clear that DCL was not the best route to go (I can be a bit slow at times). I then started converting this all to macro and eventually designed and mostly built a standalone NMS that included both DECnets (NICE and CMIP) SCS, IP(SNMP), IPX/SPX, LAT and other protocols that were around then.
As far as examples go, I released the macro version of this to the Freeware (v5 I think) and it is there under EMU. If you want the DCL. let me know and I'll zip it up and send it.
In terms of usefulness, given a faily extensive phase IV network, the DCL programs will find all the nodes and document all characteristics in an RDB database. There is the begining of a performance management module that captured the available counters, did some rudimentary arithmetic and alerted the more obvious problems but it was clear this was not the best approach.
The macro version is similar except it will chase down all nodes on more protocols and document them in RMS files. DO NOT run this on the internet. I made this mistake once and it atempted to document the entire thing! Once it found some 15,000 nodes (of which maybe a third responded to the SNMP requests for info), the files started to get rather big. Now, doing this is probably a good way to get denied.

We've probably beaten this one to death as much as is needed publicly. If you want more (I can happily go on for days ...) sent to my email.

Regards

Paul

PS. Rob: not so much disagreeing as looking at it from a different angle.