Expand Management Programming Manual

SECTION 2
MANAGEMENT PROGRAMMING FOR THE EXPAND SUBSYSTEM
As seen in the previous section, there are several different
interfaces, both interactive and programmatic, to the EXPAND
subsystem. In some situations, the programmatic interfaces would
be preferred over the interactive interfaces for the following
reasons:
• It is efficient to transfer as many routine network-management
tasks as possible to programs running on the computer network
itself, freeing operators and other network-management person-
nel to do the work that requires judgment and creativity.
• Information obtained through the programmatic interfaces can
be used directly by an application to control its actions,
produce reports, and so forth.
An application that uses the control-and-inquiry and event-
management interfaces can perform tasks that once required
the use of two or three interactive interfaces, and such an
application can also communicate with multiple subsystems. In
addition, the capability to write your own applications allows
you to tailor them to the needs and configuration of your
network.
You could, for example, write an application that uses the
control-and-inquiry interface to check the number of errors
occurring on all the EXPAND lines in the network and stop
lines that have too many errors. An application could monitor
the events occurring in the EXPAND subsystem and react to the
notification that a line is going down by starting another line
to handle the traffic.
Your applications can communicate with other subsystems as well
as with the EXPAND subsystem. For example, you could write an
application that uses the EXPAND subsystem to bring up an EXPAND
line to a remote system and then uses the PATHWAY subsystem to
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