Network Management
Network management can be defined as OAM and P (Operation, Administration, Maintenance and Provisioning) of network and services. Among these four groups, the operations group is concerned with daily operations in providing network services. Network administration is concerned with establishing and administering the overall goals, policies, and procedure of network management. The installation and maintenance group handles functions that include both installation and repairs of facilities and equipment. Provisioning involves network planning and circuit provisioning, traditionally handled by the engineering or provisioning department. We will describe each of these functions.
GOAL OF NETWORK MANAGEMENT
The goal of network management is to ensure that the users of a network receive the information technology services with the quality of service that they expect. Towards meeting this goal, management should establish a policy to either formally or informally contract a service level agreement with the users.
From a business administration point of view, network management involves strategic and tactical planning of the engineering, operations and maintenance of a network and network services for current and future needs at minimum overall cost. Well-established communication and interaction among the various groups is necessary to perform these functions. Figure 13.1 represents the top-down view of network management functions. It comprises three major groups:
(1) Network provisioning (2) Network operations
(3) Network installation and maintenance
It is useful to consider the different functions as belonging to specific administrative groups, although there are other ways of assigning responsibilities based on an organizational structure.
Network provisioning is the primary responsibility of the engineering groups; while network installation and maintenance is the primary responsibility of the plant facilities group.
The normal daily operations are the functions of the network operations group, which controls and administers a network operation center (NOC).
The functions of NOC are concerned primarily with network operations; its secondary responsibilities are network provisioning and network installation and maintenance (I and M).
Network provisioning consists of network planning and design and is the responsibility of the engineering group. The engineering group keeps track of new technologies and introduces them as needed. Determination of what is needed and when, is made through analysis of the traffic and performance data provided by the network operations. Modifications to network provisioning may also be initiated by management decisions. Planning and efficient use of equipment can be achieved through good inventory management and modifications of network configuration by the network provisioning group.
Network management tools are helpful to the engineering group in gathering statistics and studying the trends of traffic patterns for planning purposes. Automated operations systems help in the design of circuits and measurement of the performance tune-up.
The functions of network operations, listed in Figure 13.1, are administered by the network operation center (NOC). The NOC is concerned with the daily operation of the network and providing network services. The International Organization for standards (ISO) has defined five OSI network management applications:
(1) Performance management (2) Fault management
(3) Configuration management (4) Accounting management (5) Security management.
Performance Management
The goal of performance management is to quantify, measure, report, analyze and control the performance (for example, utilization, throughput) of different network components. These components include individual devices (for example, links, routers, and hosts) as well as end-to-end abstractions such as path through the network. We will discuss shortly how protocol standards such as the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) play a central role in Internet Performance Management.
Fault Management
The goal of the fault management is to log, detect, and respond to fault conditions in the network. Fault management is concerned with the immediate handling of transient network failures (for example, link, host or router hardware or software outages), while performance management involves a longer time view and is concerned with providing acceptable levels of performance in the face of varying traffic demands and occasional network device failures. As with performance management, the SNMP protocol plays a central role in fault management.
Configuration Management
Configuration management allows a network manager to track which devices are on the managed network and the hardware and software configurations of these devices.
Accounting Management
Accounting management allows the network manager to specify, log, and control uses and device access to network resources. Usage quotas, usage-based changing, and the allocation of resource access privileges all fall under accounting.
Security Management
The goal of security management is to control access to network resources according to some well-defined policy. The key distribution centres and certification authorities are components of security management. The use of firewalls to monitor and control external access points to one's network constitutes another crucial components.
The network Installation and Maintenance (I and M) group takes care of installation and maintenance of equipment and cables. This group is the service arm of the engineering group for installation and fixing troubles in network operations. The
I and M group works closely with the help desk in responding to the problems reported from the field.
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