A Survey of the Exemplary Practices in Network Operations and Management

Abstract

A network needs to be monitored and managed for the purpose of (24 * 7 * 365) connectivity, link utilization, quality of service (QoS) and service level agreement (SLA) compliance, effective load balancing and handling fail-over of nodes. The various protocols used for monitoring are Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP). A network operations center (NOC) in an enterprise or Internet Service Provider (ISP) is organized as Tier 1 technical support for troubleshooting and maintenance, network operations team for change management, network engineering team for the implementation of a network from the scratch, corporate provisioning team for IP provisioning. The various active network monitoring tools are ping, traceroute, combination of ping and traceroute, SNMP collectors (polling). The passive network monitoring tools are log monitoring, SNMP trap receivers. The automated tools for network monitoring are SmokePing and MRTG. SmokePing records and generates a graph to portray latency to a set of hosts, using Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP). ICMP echo request is generated by the Packet InterNet Groper (PING) command. Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) records and generates a graph to depict bandwidth usage on a switch port or network link, at regular intervals. The network monitoring tool such as BEACON utilized in network management station (NMS) create a visualization of a network with nodes such as routers, switches, firewalls, packet shapers in colors of red, green and yellow.