Regardless of whether you`re a multimillion-rand company or a small company with a restricted budget, your network availability demands are quite similar. The reality is that modern business requires optimal network performance; 24x7 is no longer a buzzword but a necessity.
In essence, network management comprises real-time visibility of the corporate network infrastructure to monitor critical components and manage overall availability. Obviously, for a smaller company, critical components will be less complex, but just as crucial.
Adhering to the above demands is no mean feat. Employees expect business applications to be at their fingertips whether they are at the office or on the road. Customers and partners demand instant, around-the-clock access to your Web site to obtain product information, track inventory levels, or make purchases. Everything, therefore, must be kept running at optimum performance.
So, where do you start? Without sufficient visibility into the network, isolating the root cause of a problem can become an arduous task. But what if you could visualise your entire network in real-time and rapidly isolate the cause of downtime or performance degradation?
Indeed, instead of moving from device to device to run diagnostics - potentially using different applications and interfaces for each, you can simply monitor all manageable devices from a central management console.
The fact is that you can only manage what you can monitor, and you can only monitor what is visible on the network. For a network device such as a LAN switch or WAN router to be visible, it needs to have an IP address on the network, and support for standards-based management through SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). This will allow you to visualise your infrastructure through network management tools that:
* Create an accurate visual representation of the network topology;
* Maintain 24x7 network surveillance to measure performance and isolate problems, with customisable alerting to e-mail or SMS if required;
* Supply relevant troubleshooting information in order to eliminate downtime and quickly resolve high-latency conditions that affect critical business applications and real-time voice or video traffic;
* Provide network device auditing and change control.
Whichever way you look at it, network visualisation allows IT to automate the identification of the entire network architecture of the business. It enables you to locate all the various devices, portraying them in a wide range of viewable and manageable formats.
For example, devices can be grouped within a particular IP range or VLAN and represented graphically as a means of creating a realistic view of the layout.
Network management is essential to consolidate information about your infrastructure into a bird`s eye view perspective, especially for critical system availability, and visualisation is a good place to start.
Share
Editorial contacts