Solving a Management Problem: Patton's Monitoring & Control System An Alternative to SNMP

System managers use network management software to monitor, control, and test communication devices. A variety of standardized and proprietary management systems have been deployed. However, Simple Networking Management Protocol (SNMP) has been viewed as the industry standard for the local area networking environment and for some internal network backbone infrastructures that use ATM or FDDI. With the explosion of the Internet and widespread demand for connectivity, thousands of ports are now being added for Internet and last mile access every day. In many of these instances, simplicity and low cost are the top priorities, and SNMP is not as attractive a management option as it has been in previous networking scenarios. But are there any real-world alternatives to SNMP? Fortunately, the answer is "yes." Patton's Monitoring and Control System (MCS) is an attractive alternative to SNMP for Internet and access product management. MCS is a standard system extending to all of Patton's managed transmission products. These include the Patton Model 1092 (standalone) and 1092RC (rack card) baseband modems and the Patton Model 2500 (standalone) and 2500RC (rack card) all-rate CSU/DSUs. Using Patton's MCS, net managers can perform local and remote monitoring and control simply by connecting an ASCII terminal to an externally accessible RS-232 serial port on a managed Patton transmission product.