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: Agents installed on infrastructure Synthetic monitoring that simulates transactions Logs of activity 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: to gather and store configurations from network devices (this can be done locally or remotely). to simplify the configuration of the device to track changes that are made to the configuration 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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