Network Management Systems

Network Management Systems

Jose A. Oquendo Mojica

NETW420: Enterprise Network Management

Professor Bogoevski

DeVry University

3/9/2013

Network Management Systems

Enterprise networks can be vast and complex interlinking of devices and software meant to increase productivity and ease collaboration. The easier these networks help workers the more complex they can become. Network management systems are a collection of devices and software used to make the day-to-day tasks of managing networks easier to accomplish by IT personnel. There are many tools available on the market to ensure efficient network functionality. Hewlett Packard (HP) offers many network management tools free of charge that are just as functional as paid tools and are a viable cost saving alternative for small to medium business networks . Three of the tools offered by Hewlett Packard are the HP Ping your Network Utility, the Network Device Configuration Inspector Utility, and finally the Network Flow Analytics Utility.

Connectivity is the very essence of networks and thus ensuring that devices are connected and can transmit and receive date traffic is crucial. One way to ensure devices on a network are connected is to transmit an ICMP packet or ping the device.

HP’s Ping your Network Utility is a tool used to ping host on a network (See figure to the left). Entering a range of IP addresses into this utility and all hosts within the subnet range are pinged and the results printed to a text document (Pinskey, 2013).

The results printout contains information useful to a network technician such as host reachability and round trip time (RTT) or the time it takes the ping to travel through the network. If there is a name server installed, this utility provides hostnames for all the devices on the network.

A network has many different devices all individually configured to function in unison with each other. Configuration errors can have adverse effects on network...