General Support Features

The features that are described in this section provide support for managing and monitoring your environment.

Autonomous Agents

Sun Management Center agents work autonomously by actively sampling key data on host systems. These agents can be polled through SNMP get requests for the current status of the monitored data.

When an agent gathers data for a monitored resource, the agent checks the data against the alarm threshold set for the resource. The agent then determines whether the data values constitute an alarm condition. If the monitored data meets the alarm threshold, the agent performs the action that is associated with the alarm condition. Agents send asynchronous messages (SNMP traps) to the server, which delivers notification of the change in the status of the monitored data.

User Security

The Sun Management Center security feature authenticates user login and access control privileges for users and groups. The software enables users to set security permissions at the administrative domain, group, host, and module levels.

You can restrict access by setting different permissions. For example, you might determine that one group of users can view and modify properties on a host, while another group of users can only see the host. For more general information about Sun Management Center security, see Chapter 18, Sun Management Center Security.

You can access Sun Management Center security features from the Attribute Editor within the console or from the CLI. For more information about the Attribute Editor, see Chapter 10, Monitoring Data Property Attributes. For more information about the CLI, see Chapter 20, Using the Command-Line Interface.