Another key area of network management planning he's knowing how to build and leverage REPORTS.
Now the NPM report writer makes it quite easy to create various types of reports but it's worthwhile
having a look at seeing which reports are available for you and how you can customize those for different
business requirements.
Now baselines are important when you're doing capacity planning or doing service level agreement SLA
management.
You also want to think about things such as availability which means how much a network is up during
that period of measurement.
You also want to think about performance and capacity planning as an example with availability.
You need to understand the term five nines or four nines what five nine simply means is that Gerring
the period of a year as an example the network is up ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of the
time.
In other words they are five nines in that number that equates to about five minutes of downtime per
year.
When you deploy a network management system it's typically going to add an overhead to your network.
This is especially true if you are using a query based system that's polling the network using a very
short interval.
So you should determine the scope and impact on the network that the network management system will
have as mentioned.
One of the things you need to think about is polling frequency.
This means how often you're going to poll devices to collect data.
The more often that you poll devices the more granular and the more detailed your statistics are going
to be.
However on the flip side that means that it's going to have a larger impact on your network because
there's more traffic being transmitted on the network the network management system is pulling the network
on a more frequent basis which puts more traffic on the network.
And in addition there's a higher load on your network devices because they have to reply back to the
network management station with information that you trying to gather from that network device.
So more polling equates to more detail and cricket detection of issues but it puts a higher load on
both the network and the devices in your network.
Now once again the advantage of more polling is that you have more detail and it's quicker to detect
issues.
However on the flip side it can create extra traffic on the network.
Now most modern network management systems and a lot of modern network devices can handle a larger amount
of network management traffic than was possible in the past the processing power of your network devices
and the speed of interfaces are a lot greater today than they were a few years ago.
So it's not as much of a problem as it may have once been.
This is another reason that you want to leverage both event based and network management protocols as
well as queery based nitpicked management protocols event based protocols once again of a real time
unsolicited feedback from your network devices.
A route is Goni and form the network management station when an interface goes down with polling based
or query based protocols.
There's a query and response.
In other words the message is queering a device for information and it's responding on Tsering back
to that query.
Now less polling equates to less bandwidth utilization but in addition equates to smaller storage requirements
which is another important thing to think about.
If you're collecting a large amount of data you need to think about your disk requirements for your
sequel's server which is way NPM stores data large amounts of data equate to biggest databases which
in turn means that you need more disk space.
Another important topic to discuss is the impact of the network topology on your network monitoring.
If an interface goes down does it impact the ability of the en mass to collect data from your network
devices.
So as an example if you viewed the network topology in something as simple as Vizio or within one of
your management tools how would an outage affect the ability of your network management system to collect
data from devices in your network.
If you had devices at a remote site and you wanted to collect statistics from those devices how will
a link down affect your ability to get to those statistics.
If there was only a single link to the remote site and you had a central network management system and
the link went down the end a mess would no longer be able to access those devices to collect data.
So you may need to deploy a network management collector on the remote site to collect data remotely
rather than trying to collect everything from a central site.
So this would mean as an example that you deploy a distributed network management architecture rather
than having a single centralized network management system.
This is especially true where you have multiple data centers.
In that case you might want to deploy multiple copies of NPM one in each data center that then forward
data to an enterprise operation consul yosi.
So remember if you can't get to it you can't monitor it.
So it's important that you keep track of your network topology because you need to ensure that you have
reachability status when the topology changes.