Although many people may perceive Network Management as an extremely complicated and diverse area of specialty, there really are only 5 questions that every Network Manager needs to think about. The main components behind every problem in Network Management, are as follows:
What do I have?
If you don’t know what you have how can you manage or monitor it. Most of the time in Network Management you’re trying to track down potential issues and how you’re going to resolve these issues. This is a very hard task especially if you’re dealing with a large scale network. If one thing goes down within the network it starts a trickle effect and then more aspects of the network will in return start to go down.
If you don’t know what you have how are you meant to know if you need an upgrade. Numerous enterprises are paying for upgrades that aren’t needed and getting charged for unnecessary maintenance. A simple tool like automated discovery management can help resolve this. It identifies what you have, displays topology maps and automatically compiles reports.
Is anything broken?
At times, technology seems like it is advancing faster than we can keep up with it. As the industry evolves, your business must adapt to take these changes, especially if you want to stay as efficient as possible. Finding out if there are any issues with your infrastructure sooner rather than later is an obvious factor, but some people find this harder than others with the size of their IT infrastructure.
Having the right Network Management solution enables you to find the flaws early on so they don’t snow ball into a catastrophe. Continuous monitoring of all systems ( devices, services, UPS’s) are all key components to eliminate these issues, an application such as Root Cause Analysis or Weathermapping can help you manage these complications.
Why is it slow?
The number one complaint is why is it slow? Everyone always presumes that it’s the networks fault that the application is slow, in reality there is a number of issues. These concerns include over capacity of links, poorly written applications, firewall problems or even QoS issues. Sometimes it’s tricky to find the actual cause of the application being slow as most of the time there is no evident issue to be found.
What can be done? TEST, TEST, TEST, and then correlate these to come up with a realistic resolution. You can use NetFlow to get a real deep dive into what’s going on.
Is it secure?
Is my network secure is a hot topic these times with breaches occurring in some of the top firm’s applications. Company’s such as JP Morgan, EBay and Snapchat have all had security threats in 2014 with a lot of their customer’s information being jeopardized. Many wonder if these networks are safe and the answer is that that they are.
There is always going to be vulnerabilities no matter what, in the first of half 2014 there were over 400 security breaches within companies withholding personal information. As long as you have a trusted network manager you should be ok, a lot of these hacks are just wake up calls for companies to improve their security network.
Our approach to security is to create, push and perform security policies. Every network application should have a good protection policy configuration. Here at NMSaaS we can create those policy checking systems which have the possibilities to take down any possible vulnerabilities and eliminate them.
Can I recover if something fails?
In reality nothing lasts forever, the average life span for a hardware device is 4 years. The main concern is are you able to recover your data if a problem arises, and the answer is yes.
What to do
- Back up all of you device configuration files (off site)
- Maintain a consistent schedule of backups.
- Have a quick and simple restoration process if something does fail.
There are always going to be problems no matter what, but what you have to remember is that there is always a solution to every problem!
