powered by TMCnet

Network Management

network management

Network Management Tips: Map it Out, Use Your Tools and Trust the Robots

September 14, 2010


Networks are essential to business practices – so it can be inconvenient when outages and other performance issues arise.

As not all problems are “hard failures,” it can sometimes be the routine issues that drag down execution -- such as traffic increases, configuration problems and failed network elements.

New network management tools and initiatives can help optimize the reliability that everyday business procedures require.

Consider the Architect – Map Out Fault Management

When a network has grown too complicated for its out-dated network management toolsets, changes must be made to ensure that it can continue performing as expected. Make sense of your network by developing a blueprint.

Discover your physical network, virtual network services and all of the complex relationships between them as a building developer might consider blueprints during construction.

Identify and assess the impact of problems via intelligent diagnostic measures, automated root-cause analysis and service-state determination. Be aware of your IT employee’s efficiency through built-in computer intelligence, targeted polling and a tailor-made user interface – and control views, roles and user permissions around your vision.

Use Your Tools – Consolidate Fault & Performance Management

Users love to blame old reliable -- the network. But all too often, performance issues are not necessarily network problems at all, but are due to the diabolical scheming of overloaded servers. In this front, it is your physical tools that can come to the rescue. There are products on the market that will unify network fault and performance management issues, put the power back in the hands of first-tier operators, diagnose problems more aptly for specialist review and optimize information sharing across all levels of network support.

This gives your team the ability to visualize and report on an application’s path through the network, displaying the fault and performance status of each link to each device along the path. This eliminates finger pointing and gets the problems to the proper team – so they can be fixed efficiently.

This sure-fire diagnostic method works just as quickly as the threat of a hammer to the head.

Trust the Robots – Automate Network Management Change and Configuration

Network management is a complicated discipline that requires careful layout, monitoring and perfected configuration settings.

This is where human error can be a real drag – most IT departments still incorporate their network management processes manually – which is not exactly foolproof.

Thankfully we are in the age of Roombas, Segways, and that cute little robot from the Intel (News - Alert) commercials. Network change and configuration management processes have become automated, allowing such errors to be eliminated.

This is especially important, as it is rumored that 80 percent of production outages can be attributed to the failure of manual processes. Analysts also throw around the figure 50-90 percent to describe the percent of downtime that is due to misconfigurations.

Auto-remediation allows networks to detect unauthorized changes and automatically restore default. Common changes can also be automated, freeing IT employees to worry about other things.

As an added bonus, automated policy reporting and audit trail logging also help companies keep within the guidelines of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Which is always important when you’re trying to not only be efficient but also… legal.


Erin Monda recently graduated from W.C.S.U. with a degree in professional writing. She primarily writes about network technologies, including cloud computing, virtualization and network optimization, however she also has a focus on E911 technologies and legislation.

Edited by Erin Monda

 
»VIEW ALL
 

Network Management Related Articles