Guild Companies

Bytware has delivered expanded support for the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) that makes it easier to monitor iSeries events from an enterprise system console. The new SNMP capabilities available for MessengerConsole and MessengerPlus will allow companies to send a greater level of detail on the current status of OS/400 servers, as well as Microsoft Windows NT servers through the MessengerNT product, to an enterprise system management console, such as Hewlett-Packard's OpenView.

While MessengerPlus and MessengerConsole have supported SNMP for the last several releases, companies were limited in the way they could use it, says Mike Grant, developer and co-owner of Reno, Nevada, based Bytware. "We've been sending out SNMP traps for some time, but we just had one object identifier [OID], with just the text of the events," Grant says. "But when you get into complex environments, you need a lot more than just text."

Having just a single OID with the text of the event was limiting to customers, Grant says. While the customers could get messages that say, for instance, there has been a power outage among the AS/400s, the lack of detail meant it could be difficult to discern which AS/400 had been affected by the outage--a critical piece of information in a busy multiplatform IT shop. The way things were, customers could get an additional level of detail by looking at the individual IP addresses that sent the SNMP traps. But too often customers configured the software in such a way that they couldn't read the individual IP addresses, Grant says.

With the new SNMP capabilities, Bytware is allowing MessengerPlus and MessengerConsole to generate a much more detailed Management Information Base file, with 12 OIDs or more. Once the Management Information Base file is generated, the Messenger product sends it, via SNMP, to the trap receiver component of the systems management console, which would normally be HP's OpenView, Computer Associates's UniCenter, or IBM's Tivoli suite of products. Some of the new OID data fields the Messenger products can now communicate include system name, date and time, severity of the event, job status, program, user, type of event, and several other types, including the event text.

MessengerPlus and MessengerConsole are systems monitoring and management utilities designed to automate many tasks that human operators would otherwise have to do. Instead of paying to have an operator on staff 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to read through OS/400 event logs and message queues and take required action, the two Messenger products can watch logs and queues for specific events, take predefined actions, and alert the operator on call, with an e-mail or a pager message, to take further action, among other capabilities. The main difference between the two products is that MessengerConsole is capable of monitoring multiple OS/400 servers or logical partitions; whereas MessengerPlus is designed for single-server environments.

Bytware developed MessengerNT several years ago to allow companies to use their OS/400 servers to monitor and manage the event logs of Windows NT servers, which were sprouting up in all kinds of places and causing concern among AS/400 managers who were looking for a way to monitor them. The new SNMP capabilities available with MessengerPlus and MessengerConsole also extend to MessengerNT, and will allow companies to monitor the status of their Windows NT servers from their systems management console, via MessengerPlus or MessengerConsole.

Bytware made its new SNMP capabilities available a few weeks ago as a patch that Messenger users on maintenance can download from the Bytware Web site. The new SNMP code is still in beta and requires users to be at the latest release of MessengerPlus and MessengerConsole, both of which are at Version 5.56. The new SNMP code will be included as a standard feature with the next major release of the Messenger products later this year.

Licenses for MessengerPlus range from $2,700 to $10,000 for the first copy, and licenses for MessengerConsole range from $4,200 to $16,000 for the first copy. MessengerNT costs $750 per Windows server. The SNMP support requires OS/400 V5R1 or higher. For more information, go to www.bytware.com.