Alarm Management Systems
Alarm management systems are specialized in collecting and monitoring alarms from the network. They help users to quickly sift through and make sense of the volumes of event and alarm messages that are received from the network. Often alarm management systems have additional capabilities to group (correlate) alarms that are likely to belong together, to offer initial diagnoses for the root cause of an alarm, or to provide impact analysis to forecast the fallout that an alarm might have....
The Impact of the Metaschema on the Schema
In the fine arts, the media that an artist uses has a great influence over the type of artwork that results. For instance, the character of a painting is different if the artist uses water colors, oil colors, crayons, or a pencil. The difference is even more dramatic if clay is used, resulting in a sculpture instead of a drawing or a painting. Of course, each medium can be used to model the same aspect of the real world, such as a person. The resulting model is called a portrait. In network...
Chris Network Administrator for a Medium Size Business
Together with a colleague who is currently on vacation, Chris is responsible for the computer and networking infrastructure of a retail chain, RC Stores, with a headquarters and 40 branch locations. RC Stores' network (see Figure 2-4) contains close to 100 routers typically, an access router and a wireless router in the branch locations, and additional networking infrastructure in the headquarters and at the warehouse. The company has turned to a managed service provider (MSP) to...
Use of CLI as a Management Protocol
Strictly speaking, CLI is not a management protocol at all. It is a command-line interface, intended for human users who interact with the device directly, not through a management application that abstracts away the details of how the communication with the device takes place. Therefore, it is perhaps a bit unfair to point out some challenges that are associated with CLI related to uses that it was not designed to support. However, management applications are faced with the problem of how to...
Subcontracting Management Tasks
In a management hierarchy, certain management tasks are subcontracted to different systems. In effect, the subcontracted systems constitute management proxies To the subordinate system, it appears that the proxy is the manager. However, the manager proxy is really only a conduit, acting on behalf of another management system that is invisible to the managed system in the agent role. You've already seen one example of management hierarchies the specialization of applications along the different...
Layer Example
The transport protocol layer provides for the underlying communication transport. Different transports are possible and can be used for example, Secure Shell (SSH) and Block Extensible Exchange Protocol (BEEP). Those protocols are specified elsewhere and are not specific to management. What Netconf does is specify the requirements that a protocol must meet so that it can be used. (It also specifies bindings for a few transports, including the ones mentioned.) For example, the transport must...
The Third Party Application Vendor
Third-party management software application vendors fill the management application gap that equipment vendors leave open. For one, management application software developed by an equipment vendor tends to support only equipment of that particular vendor. Even if multivendor support is provided, preferential treatment is given to the vendor's own equipment, in terms of both available features and the timeline at which the support becomes available. At the same time, as stated previously, in...
Management Process and Organization Of Help Desks and Cookie Cutters
Management interoperability, management function, and management layers capture different technical aspects of network management. However, network management also involves a nontechnical dimension how to organize the management. This includes the processes that are required to ensure that the networks are run smoothly and reliably, as well as the structure of the support organization. Those nontechnical aspects are the topic of the management process and organization viewpoint. The management...
Alarm and Event Filtering
Let us first turn our attention to filtering, not just of alarms, but of events in general. To focus an operator's or a management application's attention on those events that really matter, it is important to block out as many irrelevant or less important events as possible. This is analogous to the way in which the human brain is able to deal with the massive flow of data that it is constantly exposed to, such as sounds, visual images, and sensory data. To focus, it filters out massive...
Basic Alarm Management Functions
We start the discussion of alarm management with the more basic functions collecting alarms, maintaining accurate and current lists of alarms, and visualizing alarms and network state. The most basic and, at the same time, most important task the task that everything else builds on consists of simply collecting alarms from the network and making sure that nothing important is missed. This includes receiving the alarms and storing them in memory so that they can be further processed by an...
Management by Delegation
Management by delegation involves an upper-layer management system delegating certain tasks to lower-layer systems in some cases, the managed systems themselves. This is a very common theme that can be found across the various management functional areas. In many cases, tasks suitable for delegating are routine tasks that do not require interaction with a management operator or administrator. They involve a relatively low level of intelligence but often require sifting through a large amount of...
Other Material Related to This Book
There Is No Such Place As America Stories. Delacorte Press, 1970. This book contains the short story A Table Is a Table, mentioned in Chapter 6. Brown, A., A. Keller, J. Hellerstein. A Model of Configuration Complexity and Its Application to a Change Management System. In Proceedings of the 2005IEEE IFIP International Symposium on Integrated Network Management, p. 631-644, 2005. This paper contains an analysis of operational complexity that is associated with configuration...
Pat A Network Operator for a Global Service Provider
Pat works as a network operator at the Network Operations Center (NOC) of a global service provider that we shall call GSP. She and her group are responsible for monitoring both the global backbone network and the access network, which, in essence, constitutes the customer on-ramp to GSP's network. This is a big responsibility. Several terabytes of data move over GSP's backbone daily, connecting several million end customers as well as a significant percentage of global Fortune 500...
Backup and Restore
If you are a PC user (and, chances are, you are), you are aware of the importance of protecting your data by performing regular backups. You never know when your hard disk will bite the dust or whether your PC will contract a virus that could destroy your PC's file system. Having a backup of your data in such cases enables you to recover. With backups in place, contracting a virus or needing to replace your hard drive is still annoying, but it beats by far simply being wiped out. Likewise, the...
Management Mediation
In management hierarchies, the management interface that is exposed at different levels of the hierarchy is generally not the same. Instead, it changes in a number of important ways Information For starters, the information that is exposed over interfaces at different levels of a management hierarchy is not identical. You saw many examples of this a little earlier. For example, performance-related management data that is provided by managed devices can be aggregated at the intermediate level....
Standards and Industry Recommendations
Schoenwaelder, J. Case, M. Rose, S. Waldbusser. Conformance Statements for SMIv2. IETF RFC 2580, April 1999. McCloghrie, K., D. Perkins, J. Schoenwaelder, J. Case, M. Rose, S. Waldbusser. Structure of Management Information Version 2 (SMIv2). IETF RFC 2578, April 1999. McCloghrie, K., D. Perkins, J. Schoenwaelder, J. Case, M. Rose, S. Waldbusser. Textual Conventions for SMIv2. IETF RFC 2579, April 1999. These above three references specify SMIv2. RFC 2578 is the...
Decomposing Service Level Parameters
In many cases, a service is realized by a combination of multiple pieces. We already encountered the example of a hosted application service depicted in Figure 11-4. In this example, an application service provider hosts a set of applications in a data center that is accessible over a network. Multiple pieces are involved in providing this service A networking piece is used to provide connectivity to the host from the edge of the data center, with traffic possibly traversing a content switch...
Get Next Request
A manager uses a get-next request to retrieve management information from an agent, just as with a get request. However, contrary to an ordinary get request, the OIDs in the variable bindings do not specify the objects that are to be retrieved directly. Instead, for each OID specified in the request, the agent is requested to return the object with the OID that comes in lexicographical order right after that OID. An OID supplied with a get-next request can be but does not have to be an OID of...
An Example MIB2
Let us now consider an excerpt from MIB-2. For brevity, portions of the definition are omitted. The symbol is used to indicate where information is omitted within the definition excerpts. We start by taking a look at the header of the MIB module. mib-2 OBJECT IDENTIFIER mgmt 1 This definition establishes mib-2 as a new node underneath a supernode called mgmt inside the Internet object identifier tree. (mgmt is imported from another standard it identifies the subnode that is reserved for...
Management Styles
We have now seen that management tasks can be distributed across many systems and that distributed management functionality can be deployed in different ways. The remaining question is how to best make use of these capabilities. A lot of business administration literature discusses different business management approaches. Actually, scaling the task to manage networks is not all that different from scaling the task to manage other business functions, such as managing people in an organization....
Managing Oversubscription Risk
Of course, oversubscribing network resources can be risky. At times every user might simultaneously access the service. In such cases, something will have to give. Also, sometimes the usage of service between different users might not be as statistically independent as the service provider would like. An example of such a usage pattern might be in case of digital TV subscribers at a time when the Soccer World Cup final is on. When this scenario occurs, not only is a larger percentage of users...
About the Author
Alexander Clemm, Ph.D. is a Senior Architect with Cisco Systems. He has been involved with integrated management of networked systems and services since 1990. Alex has provided technical leadership for many network management development and engineering efforts from original conception to delivery to the customer. They include management instrumentation of network devices, turnkey management solutions for packet telephony and managed services, and management systems for Voice over IP...
Stateful Mediation
Ideally, management mediation follows a simple pattern The management gateway receives a request message from a manager and translates it into an equivalent request message for the agent. When a response or event message is received, the gateway translates it into an equivalent response or event message that it sends back to the manager. The pattern is very straightforward and clean management mediation involves not much more than transforming a message that the gateway can forget about after...
Networking for Management
One way in which network elements can be connected to a management system is through the network element's management port. For most routers, this is a serial interface. It is possible to connect a terminal, such as a notebook computer, directly to that serial interface using a serial cable, as illustrated in Figure 3-10. The terminal thus connected to a network device is typically referred to as a craft terminal, in reference to the craft technician who typically uses it. The craft terminal...
Function Viewpoint What Can I Do for You Today
The function viewpoint establishes what functions are supported that is, what services a manager can expect from an agent. This includes the type of requests that a manager can make and that the agent supports. It also includes capabilities that an agent has to send event messages to notify a manager of certain event occurrences. At this point, we've covered the need to establish connectivity, as well as the need for rules for the exchange of management messages. Some additional aspects that...
Sandy Administrator and Planner in an Internet Data Center
Sandy works in the Internet Data Center for a global Fortune 500 company, F500, Inc. The data center is at the center of the company's intranet, extranet, and Internet presence It hosts the company's external website, which provides company and product information and connects customers to the online ordering system. More important, it is host to all the company's crucial business data its product documents and specifications, its customer data, and its supplier data. In addition,...
Managed Technology Manageability
Manageability refers to the collective set of properties of an entity (that is, a device or a network) that allow it to be managed. Those properties can largely be attributed to the entity's management instrumentation the management interfaces that it exposes and the capabilities that those interfaces provide. However, it involves other properties as well that make the entity easier to manage, such as capabilities that reduce the need of a device to be managed in the first place. Manageability...
Assessing Network Management Effectiveness
Now that we have reviewed the factors and management features that contribute to management's business impact, how can we actually assess how well management is working What is needed is a set of metrics by which the effectiveness of management can be measured. An understanding of such metrics, along with an understanding of the different ways in which management technology contributes to those metrics, can provide invaluable guidance for determining priorities in the development and deployment...
Information Retrieval Polling and Polling Based Management
Perhaps the most prevalent type of request response management interactions involves requests for information by a manager, in which the manager interrogates the agent. This is also referred to as polling. The basic pattern is very straightforward The manager asks the agent for a particular piece, or pieces, of management information. The agent checks the validity of the request and retrieves the requested information. The agent then responds, providing the requested information in the response...
The Pros and Cons of a Dedicated Management Network
Carrying management traffic out of band can quickly result in building a fairly sophisticated network that is dedicated just to network management. This network can exist in addition and in parallel to the network that you are trying to manage a dedicated network that allows your management systems to communicate with the network elements that they are managing. However, using out-of-band management communications does not necessarily imply the use of a dedicated management network that is...
