Alarm Management
NAME
Network 420
PROFESSOR'S NAME
27 September 2013
Network fault and availability monitoring includes tools, training and processes designed to help isolate, aggregate, deduplicate and resolve faults and the availability of the network components, discover and map network topology, monitor network device health (element management) and provide root cause analyses (RCA) of fault information.
Network performance disciplines commonly focus on trend analyses, and the detailed usage of network resources. More sophisticated tools monitor performance metrics, such as quality of service (QoS) tracking, end-user experience monitoring, the response time of application interactions and the performance measurement of network conversations. Some NPM tools may enable the visualization of a set of components that makes up an application and deeper application awareness/application performance monitoring (APM) capabilities.
Network configuration and change disciplines focus on establishing best practices, policies and procedures, and set up and configurations, automation of network configuration tasks, patching, rollout, rollback, utilization of physical capacity (switch ports for example), auditing and change histories. Tools in this discipline may provide input for capacity planning, compliance, real-time notification, and reporting and workflow automation solutions.
The NPMD market is focused on providing greater visibility of an organization's IT infrastructure from a network perspective. Whereas network management tools were previously predominantly network-domain-oriented, this emphasis is shifting, and network teams are often the initial starting point to triage application, server, security and storage issues when a fault is identified before handing them over to the domain-specific teams for further troubleshooting and diagnosis.
This shift has occurred due to the network having a well-defined, protocol-based environment that can...