Managing NerveCenter - Understanding NerveCenter - What is NerveCenter? -
Understanding NerveCenter      How NerveCenter Manages Nodes

What is NerveCenter?

As corporations have focused attention on keeping their corporate networks available at all times, they have invested heavily not only in redundant hardware, but also in network management software. Unfortunately, many network management tools whose purpose is to identify network faults can overwhelm operators with raw network data. Only after manually sifting through this raw data and identifying the real problems can operators take the appropriate corrective actions.

NerveCenter is different. It is able to isolate and respond to network conditions proactively. In addition, NerveCenter is a highly-scalable, cross-platform solution.

At the heart of NerveCenter is its event correlation engine. For each device that it is monitoring, NerveCenter creates one or more finite state machines -- or alarms -- that define operational states it wants to detect. NerveCenter also defines rules that effect transitions between the operational states. These rules can be very simple; for example, a state transition can be caused by the receipt of a generic Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) trap. Or they can be quite complex and take advantage of NerveCenter's support for Perl expressions.

These state machines enable NerveCenter to correlate data from multiple sources over time before it concludes that a problem exists. As a simple example, if NerveCenter receives a link-down trap for an interface, it does not immediately report a problem; instead, it waits for a link-up trap for that interface. If NerveCenter receives a link-up trap within a given amount of time, it can ignore both traps. Otherwise, it can report that a particular communication link is down.

Once NerveCenter has identified a problem, it can take automatic corrective actions. A variety of actions can be associated with state transitions, including notifying an administrator, executing a program or script that corrects the problem, or notifying a network management platform of the network condition.

In addition to being an advanced event automation solution, NerveCenter is also a highly scalable client/server application. It can run co-resident with a network management platform (such as Hewlett Packard's OpenView Network Node Manager) and manage thousands of nodes. Or the server can be distributed as a background process at tens or even hundreds of remote offices.

Finally, NerveCenter is a cross-platform solution. NerveCenter automatically correlates events, identifies problems, and takes corrective actions across network devices running an SNMP agent, UNIX systems, and Windows workstations and servers. The capability for NerveCenter components on Windows systems to work with components on UNIX systems enables you to install NerveCenter on the type of system -- hardware and operating system -- that is most appropriate for a job. For instance you might install NerveCenter on a Windows system to monitor a small network of 1000 nodes or fewer, and you might install NerveCenter on a symmetric multiprocessor UNIX server to manage several thousand nodes. You could monitor and configure both of these systems from a Windows or UNIX workstation.