Essential SNMP

Castle Rock’s SNMPc Enterprise Edition

We’ll end the chapter with a brief discussion of Castle Rock’s SNMPc, Version 5.0, which runs on Windows NT/2000. SNMPc is a simpler product than OpenView in many respects. However, even though it’s simpler, it’s far from featureless. It’s also cheaper than OpenView, which makes it ideal for shops that don’t have a lot of money to spend on an NMS platform but need the support and backing that a commercial product provides.

Installation of SNMPc is straightforward. The installer asks for the license number and a discovery seed device. The seed device is similar to a seed file for OpenView’s netmon. In the case of SNMPc, we recommend giving it the IP address (or hostname) of your gateway, since this device can be used to discover other segments of your network. Omitting the discovery seed device will not keep SNMPc from performing discovery but will limit it to the devices on the network to which it’s directly connected.

SNMPc’s Map

Once SNMPc is up and running, you will see any devices it has discovered in the Root map view. Figure 6-8 shows the main button bar. The far right button (the house) gets you to the highest level on the map. The zooming tools allow you to pan in and out of the map, increasing or decreasing the amount of detail it shows. You can also reach the Root submap by selecting “Map View → Root submap” from the View menu.

Figure 6-8. SNMPc main button bar

Discovery and Filters

Once you are done playing around ...