Power Programming in HP Openview: Developing CMIP Management Applications

Programmer's, here you go!

Network Management Standards: SNMP, CMIP, TMN

One of the few books still in print on this subject.

SONET & T1

Learn about SONET & T1

ISDN SS7

Learn about ISDN and SS7 technology

Signaling in Telecommunications Networks

An informative book

Understanding SNMP MIBs

Don't know how to read an SNMP MIB? This book is for you.

Windows NT: SNMP

A 325 page guide.

HP Openview: A manager's guide

This 450 page book is chock full of info

How to Manage Your Network Using SNMP

A network management practicum

Few existing network elements have built in CMIP agents. In fact, most of the legacy systems have either a:

• proprietary application interface.

  This can be a problem if the application interface has no programming api. You may have to write some unix shell scripts.

• SNMP interface.

  While not ideal it does provide the ability for the agent to proxy the SNMP information.

• TL1 or some other interface.

  Again the agent will have to proxy this information.

• unix shell commands! Yes, some elements are actually managed in this fashion.

The only way for corporations to reduce their network management costs is to bombard the network element vendors to start providing CMIP-based TMN agents. Some vendors are starting to provide CMIP agents for their network elements. Except these agents are only for some of their newer pieces of equipment.

Proxy CMIP agents (Q3 adapters or Mediation devices) can be written to provide the necessary functionality. Again you have to plan this into your project plan. This is a little trickier since the developer tasked with this requires knowledge of both the CMIP issues and the legacy system's interface. But a competent programmer should be able to write a proxy agent in about 3 months.