On Fri, 24 Sep 1999, Robert Sudano wrote:
> Need some info. Please feel free to address any part of this.
>
> Our developers, who are Tcltk oriented have never embraced
> HPOV, and are proposing the
> replacement of NNM 5.0 with something called "Scotty".
> Scotty gives the tcl guys a warm fuzzy feeling -- they'll
> then be better able to control things then they can in the arcane
> world of NNM, so they think.
> These guys are mission oriented, and the world of IP, except
> for transport is something they pay little attention to.
> Of course operations has a much greater concern about IP.
>
>From the Scotty home page at http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~schoenw/scotty/
<quote>
Overview
Scotty is the name of a software package which allows to implement site
specific network management software using high-level, string-based APIs.
The software is based on the Tool Command Language which simplifies the
development of portable network management scripts. The scotty source
distribution includes two major components. The first one is the Tnm Tcl
Extension which provides access to network management information sources.
The second component is the Tkined network editor which provides a
framework for an extensible network management system.
Tnm Tcl Extension
The Tnm Tcl extension allows to access network management information
sources from within
Tcl. The Tnm extension supports the following protocols:
1.SNMP (SNMPv1, SNMPv2c, SNMPv2u including access to MIB definitions)
2.ICMP (echo, mask, timestamp and udp/icmp traceroute requests)
3.DNS (a, ptr, hinfo, mx and soa record lookups)
4.HTTP (server and client side)
5.SUN RPC (portmapper, mount, rstat, etherstat, pcnfs services)
6.NTP (version 3 mode 6 request)
7.UDP (send and receive UDP datagrams - no channels yet)
Additional commands are provided to simplify the implementation of
network management
applications:
1.The netdb command allows to access local network databases (host
names and IP
addresses, service names and number, network names, protocol names,
Sun RPC service
names).
2.The syslog command allows to send messages to the local system
logging facility.
3.The job command simplifies the implementation of monitoring or
control procedures that
need to be scheduled at regular intervals.
</quote>
> Does anyone have experience with scotty?
Yes, I have written scripts for extracting data from 3Com
portswitch hubs' RMON agents, Nortel/Bay Accelar switches, ARP cache
entries from all sorts of routers, and for receiving traps. I also use the
Scotty 'snmpwalk' and MIB browser tools to probe various network devices.
Writing scripts in Tcl doesn't come naturally to me as I am more
used to Perl (and not too hot at that :-) but it's not too difficult, and
the Scotty extensions allow the programmer to refer to SNMP MIB variables
by name (e.g. ipNetToMediaPhyAddress) rather than numeric dotted value.
Scotty can also load vendor-specific MIBs, which allows me easily
to investigate and collect data from e.g. our Accelar switches. This has
allowed us to obtain data automatically and continuously from problematic
devices which the vendors and their resellers/product supporters have only
been able to do manually and intermittently.
> Generally speaking, is scotty a viable replacement for HPOV?
Tkined is a NNM-alike app. It can discover networks, and draw maps
(though it places discovered devices in a great heap on the canvas, which
you have to manually arrange). You can select devices manually or with
wildcards on IP address or name, and group them. Whilst discovering, it
uses ICMP to find devices with wrongly-configured subnet masks, which is
useful.
It can monitor reachability of devices and colour them red when
they go down, and you can monitor, with thumbnail bar-graphs, traffic on
devices' interfaces, and load and disk space on servers, but it doesn't
collect info when the Tkined display isn't running, and in my experience
it loses state between runs. In short it's a bit rudimentary and needs
much further development. I believe Juergen Schoenwaelder (developer of
Scotty & Tkined) has been concentrating on developing the Tnm toolkit and
acknowledges (IIRC) that Tkined needs an overhaul. It would be nice if
someone were to take this on, but it would be a substantial project.
So the short answer is ...
> Generally speaking, is scotty a viable replacement for HPOV?
... no :-)
> Can it accept add-ons and plug-ins (nervecenter, CW2000
> compatible)? Pros? Con? ECS?
> I never heard of scotty mentioned on this forum in the same vain
> as CA or Tivoli products in any comparisons to OpenView.
-- John Stumbles Network Operations Centre noc@reading.ac.uk I.T. Services Centre University of Reading http://www.rdg.ac.uk/ITS/NOC +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
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