A Complete CMIP Development Environment for TMN Agent Development
Agent creation is one of the greatest challenges in the telecommunications world today. By using agents, telecommunications service providers can integrate legacy systems as well as new network elements into the same TMN structure. This enables them to save time and money on network management, as well as increasing the quality of the service they provide to customers.
The Solstice TMN Agent Toolkit provides a complete CMIP development environment for TMN agent development. It includes core agent functions and standard methods for agent/object communication to make agent development easier and quicker.
Agents developed with Solstice TMN Agent Toolkit can run on Solaris SPARC or Intel platforms, or on a SPARC engine embedded in a network element. This allows several different configurations to be integrated into a TMN network management system.
The Toolkit enables cost-effective deployment, since there is no run-time TMN agent fee. The developed agent will, however, still need to run on top of Solstice CMIP Runtime for CMIP protocol and CMIS services.
Only the code shown in Box 2, which defines the details of the specific resource to be managed by the developed agent, has to be generated manually by the developer. All the rest is provided by the Agent Toolkit. The code produced by the GDMO compiler and the code produced by the developer are integrated with the core agent functions, and an agent is produced.
Key Benefits
Saves on training and development costs by simplifying TMN agent development. It hides much of the complexity of the standard APIs for CMIP (namely XMP and XOM), and provides core agent functions and standard methods for agent/object communications.
Increases productivity by providing simple C APIs and by automating a large part of the development process. It reduces the number of lines of code required to develop a simple agent to 600, significantly less the 22,000 lines required if you use the XOM/XMP APIs directly.
As a result of the first two benefits, the Solstice TMN Agent Toolkit shortens time to market.
The deployment cost of agents developed with the toolkit is low. This is because the agents do not require a network management platform on which to run, only a CMIP stack, so there is no platform runtime fee. There is no runtime license fee per agent developed either.
Agents developed using the toolkit require little memory and disk space. An agent can easily manage at least 100,000 objects on a standard 32 Mbyte SPARCstation.
New Features
Solstice TMN Agent Toolkit 2.0 offers a combined GDMO/ASN.1 compiler that generates an agent skeleton from the GDMO information, including encoding/decoding functions for the user-provided ASN.1 syntax.
An enhanced programming interface enables asynchronous handling of requests and replies in order to avoid blocking the thread of control while these are being processed.
Solstice TMN Agent Toolkit 2.0 implements the ISO Log Management Function (x.735/ISO 10164-6).
It also incorporates Solstice x86 runtime libraries, which enable agents developed using the Toolkit to run on a SPARC x86 platform.
Product Components
GDMO compiler, which generates an agent skeleton. The compiler reads standard GDMO input files and outputs C-structures and skeleton callback functions, which can be linked with the core agent. In case of error, the compiler generates helpful error messages.
Core agent, which handles all CMIP operations: scoping and filtering, linked replies, events, asynchronous and synchronous access to the MIT (Management Information Tree).
APIs including:
A control API, which initializes and controls the core agent.
A generic object API, which hides XMP/XOM and helps with the development of objects using GDMO descriptions.
A Management Information Tree (MIT) API, which controls the MIT.
A Definition of Management Information (DMI) API, which provides
a high-level interface to the standard objects defined by the DMI. This relieves the programmer of the need to encode and decode common ASN.1 syntaxes.
A low-level (LL) API, which requires the use of XOM and supports
both synchronous and asynchronous modes. This is used for development of CMIP
gateways.
A response API, which enables the sending of responses and is only needed if the LL API is used.
System Management Functions (SMFs), including:
Object management (X.730/ISO 10165-1). This allows an agent to emit notifications when objects are created or deleted, and when attribute values are changed.
State management (X.731/ISO 10165-2). This allows managed object
classes to support the state attributes defined in X.731, and emit notifications when these state attributes change.
Attributes for representing relationships (X.732/ISO 10165-3). This allows a managed object class to support the standard attributes defined in X.732 to represent relationships between objects. It also allows a managed object class to emit notifications when these relationship attributes change.
Alarm reporting (X.733/ISO 10165-4). This allows a managed object class to support the generic notifications for alarm reporting specified in X.733. Managed object classes can emit these notifications in generic form, or adapt them for the particular case.
Event Forwarding Discriminator (X.734/ISO 10165-5). This allows an agent to send event reports to management stations which have prerequested reports of these events.
Platforms and Requirements
Required
Runtime Version: SPARC or x86 platform with 32 MB of memory minimum
Toolkit: SPARC platform with 32 MB of memory minimum
Solaris 2.4 or later Operating System (SPARC or x86 Platform Edition)
