Acorn Solutions Inc.

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In the Works...

In the IMAS project, we also created redundant reporting infrastructures for hot standby in case of a monitoring system failure.

Many other types of events can be detected and ticketed by this solution. We worked with the customer to determine that these particular events were the most important ones to detect for their users.

About the IMAS Project

In this project, we designed & implemented an automated monitoring and trouble-ticketing system for a large (over 100,000 nodes planned) NT, Novell, & UNIX network. This system allows these client nodes to detect certain of their own problems and generate their own Help Desk trouble tickets automatically. This minimizes the end-user's need to identify and report problems and in many instances enables the Help Desk to start fixing a problem before the user is even aware of it.

The solution utilizes off-the-shelf software agents and custom configurations to: detect system events, report them via SNMP traps, and then turn these SNMP traps into Help Desk trouble-tickets. The off-the-shelf components used in this case were: Microsoft's SMS, HP Openview, Seagate NerveCenter Pro, and Remedy "Action Request System". An architectural overview for this system is shown below:

imas.jpg (57643 bytes)

The types of events that are currently being detected and trouble ticketed by this system include:

Viruses detected during auto-scan
RAID disk failures
Login attempt limits exceeded
System backup job failures
UPS detected power failures
NT service startup failures
Disk utilization limits exceeded
CPU utilization limits exceeded
Microsoft SMS inventory process failures
Software package distribution failures

At the conclusion of our role in the project, this system was already monitoring and trouble ticketing over 3000 nodes.