Category: security

Network Management Systems

The rumor on how Disney uses Network Management.

When the temperature
rises on the park grounds at Disneyland all the prices of the beverage
vending machines automatically goes up by 10% to fully capitalize on
consumer demand.  I believe that is an old Information Technology rumor to explain how network management works… at least I hope it is a rumor.

Why Network Management is important.

More and more organizations depend on their networks.  Business’ the depend heavily on the status of their networks must have network management tools as they grow.  If
a network dependent business such as ebay, Google, Yahoo and many
others go down for even a few minutes, they can loose literally
hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales and even a small piece of
their customer’s confidence which could in turn affect the value of
their stock.  When every second of network time counts the system must be monitored continuously.  The most cost effective way to do this is to use an automated network management tool. 

Network Management Standards

The International
Organization for Standards (ISO) addresses the five major functional
area of the Network Management Model as performance management,
accounting management, configuration management, fault management and
security management.

Performance Management

Performance
management is monitoring, assessing, and adjusting the available
bandwidth and network resource usage in order make a network run more
efficiently.  Performance management is a
very important part of the network management model particularly to the
business and/or organization that wants to streamline their network's
performance. 

An example might be a
business that has an administrative office who works from 9-5 and
requires steady use of the network all day.  Everyday at right after lunch the network seems to slow down to a halt and slows down the production considerably.  Using a program like Solar Winds might show an increase in actual nodes and data flowing on the network in the afternoon.  Solar Winds
would actually help an Network Managers pinpoint the group of new nodes
and find that the reason for the after lunch network performance slow
down is due to a group of contracted programmers who come in everyday
at 1pm to do work.  After identifying the performance issues, System Administrators would then be able to balance the usage of bandwidth.  Devices from companies such as Orbital Data and Cisco even support Performance monitoring over Wide Area Networks connection.

Accounting Management

Accounting management monitors and assesses the usage of data and/or resources for the purpose of billing.  This aspect of the network management is by Internet Service Providers to bill customers for the resources they use. 

Configuration Management

The configuration
side of network management is for tracking the hardware and software
versions on the network to identify their effects on the network's
operation.  An example of this is
Microsoft’s System Management Server (SMS) which has the capability to
monitor, manage and track every piece of software and hardware on a
given network.  Configuration management
tools are great for establishing assurance for business owner who know
the importance of maintaining control of the networks baseline.

Fault Management

Fault Management is what most people think of when they think of network management.  The
purpose of this area of network management is to detect, log and alert
the system administrators of problems that might effect the systems
operations.  An organization such as Tivoli,
HP Openview or WhatupGold could be used to actually page the Network
Manager when a particular node or section of the network goes down.

Security Management

Security Management
deals with controlling access to resources and even alerting the proper
authorities when certain resources are accessed.  In
the same way that a network manager can be paged or emailed when a
resource goes down, network management systems can be used to send
messages when certain files, servers or routers is accesses.  Intrusion detection systems such as Symantec’s Intruder Alert have this security management capability.

There are many products that support some or even all of these areas of network management.  What
most network management systems have in common is their use of
protocols such as Simple Network Management Protocols (SNMP), SNMPv3,
and Common Management Information Protocol (CMIP). There are a variety
of Network Management tools ranging from Intuit's Network Management
Software to IBM's Tivoli, Fidelia's Helix to AdventNet.  Maybe
your network management solution does not include a system that
increases vending machine prices as the heat rises, but you can
definitely find what you need among these and other excellent tools on
the market.

References:

Cisco. Network Management Basics. Cisco.com. Feb 2002

            http://www.cisco.com/

RFC 1157. Simple Network Management Protocol.

            http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1157.html

Wikipedia. Network Management. Wikipedia.org.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_management

ITPRC. Network Management. Itprc.com

http://www.itprc.com/nms.htm