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Frequently Asked Questions

Multi-Protocol Agent

1. What are the different protocols supported by the multi-protocol agents?
2. Is there any kind of authentication system in a Multi-Protocol agent? Can you authenticate with user name and password?
3. Does AdventNet Multi-Protocol agent deal with restricting/limiting access to management information based on an authentication/authorization?
4. How does AdventNet Agent Toolkit provide distributed management system? Can the agent toolkit serve to leverage legacy SNMP agent in the network?
5. Does AdventNet offer any service to discover multi-protocol agent in the network? If so, how are the agents discovered only on the localhost?
6. When AdventNet Multi-Protocol agent crashes, does the restart of the server require to restart all the other applications that were being managed earlier?
7. How do I write my own protocol adaptor and add it to the MBean Server?

1. What are the different protocols supported by the multi-protocol agents?

The different protocols supported by the multi-protocol agents are SNMP, TL1, RMI, CORBA, and HTTP.

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2. Is there any kind of authentication system in a Multi-Protocol agent? Can you authenticate with user name and password?

Yes, the AdventNet Multi-Protocol agent provides the option to authenticate the users before allowing them to access the agent information.  The authentication is based on user names and password. 

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3. Does AdventNet Multi-Protocol agent deal with restricting/limiting access to MBeans based on an authentication/authorization? 

The AdventNet Multi-Protocol agent has implemented the View-Based Authorization Service that will help you restrict/ limit access to MBeans based on user authentication.

The user authentication is not common across all the adaptors but depends on the adaptor implementation. Each user is configured a particular view and this view determines the access for that user. Also, this service in itself is implemented as a managed object, so that the configurations can remotely be managed without restarting the agent. This gives the flexibility to add, delete, and modify users and their configuration at runtime.

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4.  How does AdventNet Agent Toolkit provide distributed management system? Can the agent toolkit serve to leverage legacy SNMP agent in the network?

AdventNet Agent Toolkit provides distributed management system through the Cascading Service. Through the service, the sub-agents are connected to the master agent with the help of the RMI/CORBA/HTTP.

The multi-protocol agent also serves to leverage legacy SNMP agents in the network through JMX-SNMP proxy feature. For more information, please refer to the Master Subagent Architecture in Multi-Protocol Agent section of help documentation

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5. Does AdventNet offer any service to discover multi-protocol agent in the network? If so, how are the agents discovered only on the localhost?

Yes. AdventNet offers discovery service that discovers multi-protocol agent in the network. This service relies on a discovery client object, which sends out multi-cast requests to find agents. Refer to "Discovery Service" section of the help documentation, to know more about implementing the service.

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6. When AdventNet Multi-Protocol agent crashes, does the restart of the agent require to restart all the other applications that were being managed earlier ? 

This is not mandatory, if the application is running on a different JVM. Once the JMX server restarts, it has to connect to the applications managed and get the management interface ( MBeans) for the applications. 

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7. How do I write my own protocol adaptor and add it to the MBean Server? 

By following the AdventNet framework for adaptors, you can write your own adaptor MBean, which can be registered with the MBean server like all the other adaptors.  Please refer to the topic "Writing custom protocol Adaptors for the Multi-Protocol Agent" in the help documentation for more information. 

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