Editing Cartographer Release 1 Announcement

We are pleased to announce the first public release of the [[Cartographer]] project.

[[File:Download.png|right|link=Distributions|Software Distributions]]

Cartographer implements a novel approach to managing distributed systems by automatically discovering and tracking the relationships between its component systems and applications.  Cartographer does so via specially designed agents -- residing on clients, servers and (potentially) network devices -- that detect, identify, and track the inter and intra-system dependencies or relationships.  Dependencies include network level services like DNS, DHCP, and SMTP as well as higher-level application abstractions like filesystems, databases, directory services, telephony, and middleware.  Once dependencies are discovered, Cartographer agents automatically organize systems and applications into peer-to-peer overlays.  The overlays are used to
exchange management information, troubleshoot, and seed automated mechanisms for monitoring and management.  As part of this approach, we have implemented a new management protocol, called XMP, based on the Internet Management Framework's structure of management information (SMI) and management information bases (MIBs).

The first release consists three separate, downloadable components.

  1) A binary distribution containing the Cartographer agent engine, MIB2-plugin, Cartographer-plugin, and query tools.

  2) A source code distribution containing the GPL'd code for the Cartographer agent engine and MIB-2 plugin.

  3) The Cartographer graphical user interface, or GUI, written in Java and available in binary format.  This tool is designed 
     for viewing dependency relationships and performing queries.

Supported platforms include Linux 32 and 64-bit systems on x86, Solaris 9+ on Sparc, Solaris 9+ on x86, and Windows XP+ on 32-bit x86 systems.

In addition to its novel approach, Cartographer agents can also be used in a variety of existing network, system, and application
management settings through a growing list of third-party management applications and tools.  A Collector is available for OpenNMS and should be bundled in an upcoming release.  An adapter for use with MRTG is also included in the distribution.  And, command-line tools for querying Cartographer agents are included in the distribution. Finally, a ZenPack for ZenOSS is also under development.

For more information please see the following web page.

     http://www.krupczak.org/index.php/Cartographer

Bobby Krupczak
rdk@krupczak.org
25 November 2008