Overview of the System Management Agent

The System Management Agent implements RFC 3411 at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3411.txt. The SMA is a lightweight agent that uses SNMP protocols for the management of systems. The SMA provides a standardized SNMP agent infrastructure to the Solaris software. The SMA can be extended through the use of modules written to application programming interfaces and Agent X subagents. For information on extending modules in the System Management Agent, see Solaris System Management Agent Developer’s Guide. For information about AgentX, see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2741.txt.

The System Management Agent is designed to be a standalone agent. The SMA can be accessed by multiple management applications, provided that these management applications communicate with the SMA using SNMP protocols. The SMA can coexist with existing SNMP agents. The SMA replaces some legacy SNMP agents.

The SMA is a new SNMP agent offering from Sun, based on the Net-SNMP open source implementation version 5.0.9. This open source implementation is described at http://www.net-snmp.org/. This open source implementation was formerly known as UCD-SNMP. The System Management Agent is designed to support the latest SNMP standards.

In this Solaris release, the System Management Agent can co-exist with the Solstice Enterprise Agents^TM software. For more information about the Solstice Enterprise Agents software, see the Solstice Enterprise Agents 1.0 User Guide. From an SNMP manager view, the System Management Agent operates in the same way the Solstice Enterprise Agents software. Unlike the Solstice Enterprise Agents software, the System Management Agent supports SNMPv3. The System Management Agent supports more default MIBs than the Solstice Enterprise Agents software.

For information about migration from the Solstice Enterprise Agents to the System Management Agent, see Migration From Solstice Enterprise Agents Software. For information about migrating your applications from the Solstice Enterprise Agents to the System Management Agent, see the Solaris System Management Agent Developer’s Guide.