Network Management: Aligning the Toolkit with the Business Requirements

To serve ever-growing business demands and support new devices and technologies, the network continues to expand in size, services and complexity. Thus, IT staffs at companies of all sizes — from multinational corporations to government agencies to service providers — are greatly challenged to provide high-performing, available and dependable multi-service network infrastructures that effectively must support a wide variety of business requirements.

To solve these challenges, network operations teams have traditionally relied on tools such as continuous capture, distributed monitoring (probes), flow collection, alarming, analysis and reporting to anticipate impact, proactively monitor performance, accelerate problem resolution, and control network configurations and changes.

Today’s network management teams need advanced and often specialized tools to build a solid network infrastructure that maintains desired service levels; tools that provide information to specific groups, such as:

• Application monitoring
• Network capacity planning
• Network performance management
• Network troubleshooting
• VoIP management
• Standards and regulatory
• Configuration and compliance
• Process automation — root cause analysis

To underscore this point, let’s look at application-specific tools like VoIP/IPT. With this specialized technology, network managers can scan all voice communications, detect drop in mean opinion score for a particular IP PBX (News - Alert)/handset, present voice quality alerts, provide voice quality reports, maintain optimum reliability and provide fault detection and remediation services. This kind of detailed information — not available with traditional network tools — creates built-in service and improves network operation.

Network Management vendors are maturing rapidly and very dynamic. By employing the right mix of advanced tools, applications and devices, network management can build and maintain solid network infrastructures that support current and future service level objectives and business requirements. Selecting the right network management tools requires strategic — not merely budgetary — evaluation of all the available options, with attention to enterprise-wide business requirements, deployment challenges and the potential impact of governance issues.

Juan Amaya is a network solutions architect and technologist at Forsythe Technology. He has more than 15 years of experience in networking, telecom, security and IT and holds numerous current manufacturer certifications.

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