Intermapper

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The InterMapper (see http://www.intermapper.com) is an SNMP monitor that runs on the Mac platform. You configure it to monitor a list of hosts using a basic ping test or a more informative SNMP test — SNMP “system” parameters can give information about system uptime, operating system and much more. The InterMapper does not, to the best of my knowledge, probe any of the more esoteric SNMP parameters. At our site, we don’t use SNMP alerts (those are “alarms”), nor do we use SNMP to control systems. While I don’t know very much about SNMP, it was clear from the outset that our InterMapper requirements were very modest indeed.

We have other systems where our SNMP monitoring requirements are much more than those discussed here. We have backroom database systems where we monitor the performance using a vendor-provided utility that “plugs into” the SNMP suite provided by Sun. A daemon is provided that extends the Sun service by acting as a back-end to the snmpdx daemon in the same way that the dmispd and mibiisa do. It’s pretty clear that for those systems we cannot eliminate as many services. More work is required to determine which components are required in that context. Nevertheless, we recognize the backroom database server is the exceptional case. Most servers require much less.