Network management, especially on a service provider scale, involves a great variety of functions -- from monitoring devices in the network to provisioning services, from diagnosing networking problems to planning for optimum network performance, from detecting security breaches to assessing the impact of planned network maintenance on existing services and customers.
One of the challenges in network management -- indeed, some would argue, the "holy grail" in network management -- lies in providing operational support infrastructure and management systems that are integrated. This means that all management functionality that is required for everything that needs to be managed is provided in one holistic solution, as opposed to providing the functionality in multiple, separate parts that essentially form separate islands.
Having multiple management islands can cause many problems that could be avoided with an integrated solution: Data needs to be maintained redundantly and can run out of synch, training cost increases for operational staff that needs to be familiar with a multitude of systems, and management tasks fall through the cracks.
This chapter excerpt from Network Management Fundamentals by Alexander Clemm, takes a closer look at the challenges that are associated with integrated management. Recognizing what those challenges are is the first step in confronting them successfully. The chapter also discusses some techniques that can be used to tackle those challenges and some of the trade-offs that they involve.
You will learn:
-
Many of the factors that make management integration a challenge, which is a prerequisite for being able to deal with them successfully
- How the different management dimensions encountered in earlier chapters can be used to approach management integration
- How to recognize trade-offs between platform- and component-based integration approaches, and between tight and loose management integration
- Approaches that can help you reduce the complexity of management tasks you
might face
Read the rest of Management integration: Putting the pieces together in this PDF.
Excerpted from Network Management Fundamentals by Alexander Clemm (ISBN: 9781587201370).
Copyright © 2007, Cisco Press. All rights reserved.
