Network Management Systems

Network Management Systems


Mar. 16, 2013

Data networks are the backbone of today’s information hungry society. We constantly crave better, faster and more efficient networks to connect us to each other around the world. With large networks there is a certain responsibility of monitoring and maintaining the flow of data traffic. To tackle such a task Network Management Systems (NMS) was created. NMS monitors and maintains the network to ease the burden for network engineers. NMS and its various components will be the focal point of this essay.

NMS is a collection of hardware and software components brought together in a cohesive manner for network engineers to keep track of the network health. The concept of NMS has been around for three decades and has evolved from a set of simple tools to a complex mesh of hardware and software components across many different vendors. A perfect NMS should do all of the listed items below:

* Simple to use

* Maintain and monitor all networks from one terminal

* Can handle multi vendor hardware and software

* Gives smart and accurate performance measurement

* Have many different networking tools built in that can work across the network

* Able to detect network problems and isolate them immediately

* Cost effective

Many vendors are trying to develop a NMS that can be a perfect solution for most networks but with many companies involve this is hard to achieve.

Managers and agents are the building blocks of NMS. Managers collect data about the devices in the network, whereas agents are the devices that are being managed by the managers. This setup can be compared to client and server relationship, however in NMS there are many servers (agents) that are feeding the client (managers) information about the managed devices. Network engineers are interested in tracking various components of managed agents such as the version of installed software, ports activity, environmental data (temperature and...