Network Management Engine (NME)
NME is a customizable software framework that was created to expedite the development and deployment of SNMP based centralized managers such as NMS (Network Management System) and EMS (Element Management System) and provides functionality to monitor, control, and manage a vast number and type of individual network elements. NME's core functionality provides most of the server-side services an SNMP manager needs and provides easy integration for customers to develop their own client-side (GUI) functionality.
NME takes ease-of-integration to the next level by allowing customers to bridge these products using web services. NME can also act as a mediation device or a bridge between SNMP and Web Services (using SOAP and WSDL) and also allows a manager to expose its management capabilities as web services that may be accessed by SOAP over HTTP.
Features List:
SNMP Management
NME includes a layered support for a pluggable SNMP library stack with all its standard SNMP operations and it provides for normalizing SNMP MIB oriented device structure into a device neutral structure.
Fault Management
NME provides a centralized treatment of faults in the system. Allows integrating custom types of faults handlers through the use of pluggable faults modules interface. Provides hooks that allow the pre-processing of faults in order to perform faults correlations etc.
Polling Manager Module
NME supports polling network devices so that a network management server can hold an up-to-date view of managed devices.
Storage Access Module
NME includes support for saving objects state into persistent storage. It supports multiple brands of DBMS software through the use of pluggable DBMS modules.
Security Manager Module
NME provides a layer of security services that may be used throughout the system in order to protect network resources from unauthorized use. It includes a user management system, security gates, security groups, and security domains so that a custom network management system built using this framework will be able to provide VPN-like views of the system.
Logging Manager Module
NME provides a centralized logging services for all the management modules. It provides the means to perform fine-grained logging and it supports logging domains, logging severities and a rotating logs mechanism.
Auditing Manager Module
NME provides support for auditing operations that are performed in the system. It also allows tracking certain types of activities or performing specific hooks if something unusual happens (e.g., it will be possible to register a hook that sends an SMS message if a backup operation has failed).
Configuration Manager Module
NME provides a flexible API for storing and retrieving system configuration parameters (e.g., address of an FTP server, URL of database resources etc). It may also send notifications whenever configuration data changes.
Resource Locking Management
NME provides a flexible locking API for coordinating operations performed by the network management software. This feature can be very useful when we want to prevent possible race conditions.
Web Services Support
NME provides a layer on top of most of its functionality that allows selected operations in each module to be performed as a web service. These services are described in a WSDL document and available by running an application server (such as Apache's Tomcat) on the NME platform that would connect to the web using SOAP.