The View From There
SNMPc uses an Explorerlike interface to display its operations. In the default view, the console window is split into three panels, which show all operations. The left panel contains five tabs: map, MIB, trend, event and menu. The map tab lists the discovered devices, sorted by subnet. The MIB tab displays a MIB browser that lets you view information for a selected device and shows private MIBs from device manufacturers.
From the trend tab, you can design trending reports that collect data from devices over time. You build reports by selecting common variables from a drop-down menu, such as interface usage (in bits per second) and interface utilization (expressed as percentages). I built several reports with just few mouse clicks and, after waiting a short period for data collection, viewed my reports on-screen.
The event tab lets you set alarms and specify how admins should be alerted. To test the alarm, I put one of my Web servers on Port 8080, rather than the standard port, and created a customized TCP port service for polling the server using SNMPc. I configured an event condition to notify me with an on-screen alarm and a WAV sound if the monitored port on the server went down. I then stopped the Web service manually. SNMPc used its customized port polling to notify me that the service was down.
The lower section of the console window is the event log-alarm panel. From here you can configure up to eight custom log views that filter for specific objects and/ or their status. The logs display all the alarms and polling log messages generated by the application, including tab views for current and historical events. I created a filter for all devices that had a critical-red alarm and saw all the devices in that status. I also created a filter for my mail server, which let me view historical data on the server--both the server status and the status of the SMTP service being monitored.
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