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Network management
Network management refers to the activities, methods, procedures, and tools
that pertain to the operation, administration, maintenance, and provisioning of
networked systems.
• Operation: deals with keeping the network (and the services that the network
provides) up and running smoothly. It includes monitoring the network to spot
problems as soon as possible, ideally before users are affected.
Network management
• Administration: deals with keeping track of resources in the network and
how they are assigned. It includes all the "housekeeping" that is necessary to
keep the network under control.
• Maintenance: is concerned with performing repairs and upgrades, for
example, when equipment must be replaced, when a router needs a patch for
an operating system image, when a new switch is added to a network.
Maintenance also involves corrective and preventive measures to make the
managed network run "better", such as adjusting device configuration
parameters.
• Provisioning: is concerned with configuring resources in the network to
support a given service. For example, this might include setting up the
network so that a new customer can receive voice service.
Network management
Data for network management is collected through several mechanisms
including:
1) Agents installed on infrastructure
2) Synthetic monitoring that simulates transactions
3) Logs of activity
4) Sniffers and real user monitoring.
In the past network management mainly consisted of monitoring whether
devices were up or down; today performance management has become a
crucial part of the IT team's role which brings about a host of challenges
especially for global organizations.
Network management
Network management can be characterized based on the functions it
carries out:
Configuration Management: inventory, configuration, provisioning
Fault Management: reactive and proactive network fault management
Performance Management: number of packets dropped, timeouts, collisions,
CRC errors
Security Management: SNMP doesn’t provide much here
Accounting Management: cost management and chargeback assessment
Asset Management: statistics of equipment, facility, and administration
personnel
Planning Management: analysis of trends to help justify a network upgrade or
bandwidth increase
Network management
Configuration Management:
The goals of configuration management include:
1) to gather and store configurations from network devices (this can be
done locally or remotely).
2) to simplify the configuration of the device
3) to track changes that are made to the configuration
4) to configure ('provision') circuits or paths through non-switched
networks
Network management
Fault Management:
A fault is an event that has a negative significance. The goal of fault management
is to recognize, isolate, correct and log faults that occur in the network.
Furthermore, it uses trend analysis to predict errors so that the network is always
available. This can be established by monitoring different things for abnormal
behavior.
When a fault or event occurs, a network component will often send a notification to
the network operator using a proprietary or open protocol such as SNMP, or at
least write a message to its console for a console server to catch and log/page.
This notification is supposed to trigger manual or automatic activities. For
example, the gathering of more data to identify the nature and severity of the
problem or to bring backup equipment on-line.
Fault logs are one input used to compile statistics to determine the provided
service level of individual network elements, as well as sub-networks or the whole
network. They are also used to determine apparently fragile network components
that require further attention.
Network management
Performance Management:
Performance management enables the manager to prepare the network for
the future, as well as to determine the efficiency of the current network.
For example, in relation to the investments done to set it up. The network
performance addresses the throughput, percentage utilization, error rates
and response times areas.
By collecting and analyzing performance data, the network health can be
monitored. Trends can indicate capacity or reliability issues before they
become service affecting.
Performance thresholds can be set in order to trigger an alarm. The alarm
would be handled by the normal fault management process (see above).
Alarms vary depending upon the severity.
Network management
Security Management:
Security management is the process of controlling access to assets in
the network. Data security can be achieved mainly with authentication
and encryption. Authorization to it configured with OS and DBMS
access control settings.
Network management
Accounting Management:
Accounting is often referred to as billing management. The goal is to gather
usage statistics for users.
Using the statistics the users can be billed and usage quota can be enforced.
Examples: Disk usage, Link utilization and CPU time
RADIUS, TACACS and Diameter are examples of protocols commonly used for
accounting.
For non-billed networks, "administration" replaces "accounting". The goals of
administration are to administer the set of authorized users by establishing
users, passwords, and permissions, and to administer the operations of the
equipment such as by performing software backup and synchronization.
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