NETWORK MANAGEMENT

• Network Management refers to the assessment,

monitoring, and maintenance of all aspects of a
network.
• It can include checking for hardware faults, ensuring
high QoS (quality of service) for critical applications,
maintaining records of network assets and software
configurations, and determining what time of day is
best for upgrading a router.
• Ideally, network management helps the administrator
predict problems before they occur. For example, a
trend in network usage could indicate when a switch
will be overwhelmed with traffic. In response, the
network administrator could increase the switch’s
processing capabilities (or replace the switch) before
users begin experiencing slow or dropped connections.
Types of documentation that
contribute to sound network
management.
• To adequately manage your network, you should at
least record the following:
– Physical topology—Which types of LAN and WAN
topologies does your network use: bus, star, ring, hybrid,
mesh, or a combination of these? Which type of
backbone does your network use—collapsed,
distributed, parallel, serial, or a combination of these?
Which type and grade of cabling does your network use?
– Access method—Does your network use Ethernet
(802.3), token ring (802.5), Wi-Fi (802.11), WiMAX
(802.16), or a mix of transmission methods? What
transmission speed(s) does it provide? Is it switched?
– Protocols—Which protocols are used by servers, nodes,
and connectivity devices?
– Devices—How many of the following devices are
connected to your network— switches, routers, hubs,
gateways, firewalls, access points, servers, UPSs, printers,
backup devices, and clients? Where are they physically
located? What are their model numbers and vendors?
– Operating systems—Which network and desktop operating
systems appear on the network? Which versions of these
operating systems are used by each device? Which type
and version of operating systems are used by connectivity
devices such as routers?
– Applications—Which applications are used by clients and
servers? Where do you store the applications? From where
do they run?
– Configurations—What versions of operating
systems and applications does each workstation,
server, and connectivity device run? How are
these programs configured? How is hardware
configured? The collection, storage, and
assessment of such information belongs to a
category of network management known as
configuration management. Ideally, you would
rely on configuration management software to
gather and store the information in a database,
where those who need it can easily access and
analyze the data.
 Baseline Measurements
• A baseline is a report of the network’s current state of operation.
• Baseline measurements might include the utilization rate for your
network backbone, number of users logged on per day or per hour,
number of protocols that run on your network, statistics about
errors (such as runts, collisions, jabbers, or giants), frequency with
which networked applications are used, or information regarding
which users take up the most bandwidth.
• Baseline measurements allow you to compare future performance
increases or decreases caused by network changes or events with
past network performance. Obtaining baseline measurements is the
only way to know for certain whether a pattern of usage has
changed (and requires attention) or, later, whether a network
upgrade made a difference.
• Each network requires its own approach. The elements you
measure depend on which functions are most critical to your
network and its users.
Figure below shows an example
baseline for daily network traffic
over a six-week period.
• Suppose that your network currently serves
500 users and that your backbone traffic
exceeds 50% at 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. each
business day. That pattern constitutes your
baseline. Now suppose that your company
decides to add 200 users who perform the
same types of functions on the network. The
added number of users equals 40% of the
current number of users (200/500). Therefore,
you can estimate that your backbone’s
capacity should increase by approximately
40% to maintain your current service levels.
 How do you gather baseline data on
your network?
• Although you could theoretically use a network monitor or
network analyzer and record its output at regular intervals,
several software applications can perform the baselining
for you.
• These applications range from freeware available on the
Internet to expensive, customizable hardware and software
combination products.
• Before choosing a network-baselining tool, you should
determine how you will use it.
• The baseline measurement tool should also be capable of
collecting the statistics needed. For example, only a
sophisticated tool can measure traffic generated by each
node on a network, filter traffic according to types of
protocols and errors, and simultaneously measure statistics
from several different network segments.
 Policies, procedures, and regulations
that make for sound network
management.
• Media installation and management—Includes designing
the physical layout of a cable or wireless infrastructure,
choosing and following best practices for cable
management, testing the effectiveness of cable or wireless
infrastructure, and documenting cable layouts.
• Network addressing policies—Includes choosing and
applying an addressing scheme, determining the use and
limits of subnets, integrating an internal network’s
addressing with an external network’s, and configuring
gateways for NAT.
• Resource sharing and naming conventions—Includes
establishing rules for logon IDs, setting up users and groups
and applying access restrictions, designing directory trees
and assigning objects, and configuring resource-sharing
relationships between domains and servers
• Security-related policies—Includes establishing rules
for passwords, limiting access to physical spaces such
as the data center, limiting access to shared resources
on the network, imposing restrictions on the types of
files that are saved to networked computers,
monitoring computers for malware, and conducting
regular security audits.
• Troubleshooting procedures—Includes following a
methodology for troubleshooting network problems
and documenting their solutions.
• Backup and disaster recovery procedures—Includes
establishing a method and schedule for making
backups, regularly testing the effectiveness of backups,
assigning a disaster recovery team and defining each
member’s role, and choosing a disaster recovery
strategy and testing it
 Fault and Performance Management
• Fault management,-Refers to detection and signaling of device, link,
or component faults.
• Performance management-Refers to monitoring how well links and
devices are keeping up with the demands placed on them.
• To accomplish both fault and performance management,
organizations often use enterprise-wide network management
software. Some popular applications include IBM’s Tivoli NetView
and Cisco’s CiscoWorks, but hundreds of other such tools exist.
• All rely on a similar architecture, in which at least one network
management console (which may be a server or workstation,
depending on the size of the network) collects data from multiple
networked devices at regular intervals, in a process called polling.
• Each managed device runs a network management agent, a
software routine that collects information about the device’s
operation and provides it to the network management application
running on the console.
• A managed device may contain several objects
that can be managed, including components
such as processor, memory, hard disk, NIC, or
intangibles such as performance or utilization.
• For example, on a server, an agent can
measure how many users are connected to
the server or what percentage of the
processor’s resources are used at any time.
• The definition of managed devices and their
data are collected in a MIB (Management
Information Base).
• Agents communicate information about managed
devices via any one of several Application layer
protocols. On modern networks, most agents use
SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol).
SNMP is part of the TCP/IP suite of protocols and
typically runs over UDP on port 161 (though it
can be configured to run over TCP).
• After data is collected, the network management
application can present an administrator with
several ways to view and analyze the data. For
example, a popular way to view data is in the
form of a map that shows fully functional links or
devices in green, partially (or less than optimally)
functioning links or devices in yellow, and failed
links or devices in red.
Network management architecture
Map showing network status
• Performance and fault management
monitoring does not necessarily require a
complex application.
• One of the most common network
management tools used on WANs is MRTG
(Multi Router Traffic Grapher). MRTG is a
command-line utility that uses SNMP to poll
devices, collects data in a log file, then
generates HTML-based views of the data.
MRTG is freely distributed software
 Asset Management
• Another key component in managing networks is identifying and tracking its
hardware and software through asset management.
• The first step in asset management is to take an inventory of each node on the
network. This inventory should include the total number of components on the
network, and also each device’s configuration files, model number, serial number,
location on the network, and technical support contact.
• You will also want to keep records of every piece of software purchased by your
organization, its version number, vendor, licensing, and technical support contact.
• The asset management tool you choose depends on your organization’s needs. You
might purchase an application that can automatically discover all devices on the
network and then save that information in a database, or you might use a simple
spreadsheet to save the data.
• Asset management simplifies maintaining and upgrading the network chiefly
because you know what the system includes.
• In addition, asset management provides network administrators with information
about the costs and benefits of certain types of hardware or software. For
example, if you conclude that 50% of your staff’s troubleshooting time is spent on
one flawed brand of NIC, an asset management system can reveal how many NICs
you would need to replace if you chose to replace those cards, and whether it
would make sense to replace the entire installed base.
 Change Management
• Technology advances, vendors come and go, and users’
needs change. Managing change while maintaining
your network’s efficiency and availability requires good
planning.
• Software Changes-You are most likely to implement the
following types of software changes on your network:
patches (improvements or enhancements to a
particular piece of a software application), upgrades
(major changes to the existing code), and revisions (a
general term for minor or major changes to the existing
code).
• Hardware and Physical Plant Changes-This involves
adding or upgrading equipment,Cabling upgrades(you
can upgrade in phases),Backbone upgrades
 NETWORK PERFORMANCE
• Network performance metrics
– Channel capacity
– Channel utilization
– Delay and jitter
– Packet loss and errors
 Channel Capacity
• The maximum number of bits that can be
transmitted for a unit of time (eg: bits per
second)
• Depends on:
- Bandwidth of the physical medium
• Cable
• Electromagnetic waves
-Processing capacity for each transmission
element
-Efficiency of algorithms in use to access medium
- Channel encoding and compression
 Channel Utilization
• What fraction of the channel capacity is
actually in use.
• How is this Important?
- Future planning
• What utilization growth rate am I seeing?
• For when should I plan on buying additional capacity?
• Where should I invest for my updates?
- Problem resolution
• Where are my bottlenecks, etc.
 Delay and Jitter
• Delay- This is the time required to transmit a
packet along its entire path.
• Jitter-Jitter is the uneven arrival of packets.
For example, imagine a VoIP conversation
where packet 1 arrives at a destination router.
Then, 20 ms later, packet 2 arrives. After
another 70 ms, packet 3 arrives, and then
packet 4 arrives 20 ms behind packet 3. This
variation in arrival times (that is, variable
delay) is not dropping packets, but this jitter
might be interpreted by the listener as
dropped packets.
 Packet Loss and Errors
• Occurs due to the fact that buffers are not
infinite in size.
-When a packet arrives to a buffer that is full the
packet is discarded.
- Packet loss, if it must be corrected, is resolved at
higher levels in the network stack (transport or
application layers)
- Loss correction using retransmission of packets can
cause yet more congestion if some type of (flow)
control is not used (to inform the source that it's
pointless to keep sending more packets at the
present time)