Net/Systems Management /

Pity your poor network administrator

By Kenneth Percy
Network World, 06/03/02

The functions of network management systems have long been defined by the venerable FCAPS standard, an acronym for fault management, configuration, accounting, performance and security. FCAPS speaks specifically to network management of the network, but also is useful in assessing management interfaces of the devices that power networks.

Your good old Layer 2 and Layer 3 boxes take on more functionality with each upgrade. And new, appliance-based products represent more gear that must be understood and properly managed. Highly functional, easy-to-use management interfaces that provide clear visibility into these boxes should be more than just a competitive advantage for vendors - they should be a prerequisite for getting their feet in your door.

At Miercom, we assess the management interface of every product we review, and we group our own requirements into five FCAPS-like categories.

Ease of use. A hallmark of a well-conceived management application is organized presentation. If your network administrators can navigate to the necessary screens with little help, you've probably got a winner. On the other hand, if it is kaleidoscopic, laden with vendor-specific nomenclature, and easy to lose context, it may very well be a loser.

Reporting and logging. Every product should be able to cough up at least a handful of "canned" reports. It's not unreasonable for vendors to charge extra for more robust reporting features, but you should get at least some useful reports as part of the base system. Event logs should provide plenty of information and be sortable, filterable and, above all, understandable by people other than the product's designers.

Real-time monitoring. Most applications should include counters and health statistics. Flexibility is what distinguishes good monitoring screens from excellent ones. Better monitoring functions enable your staff to choose which statistics they want to view, as counters or charts, and over a period of time they specify.

Event/alarm notification. We can't remember the last time we saw a device without SNMP support, but today you should also expect notification - in the form of a page, e-mail or highly visible alert. We've seen some elaborate notification mechanisms that do everything short of sending someone to your home. But again, flexibility is the key. Your staff should be able to choose how they get notified and be able to define event thresholds for what is a major problem and what's a minor one.

Diagnostics and troubleshooting. Relatively few of the devices we've seen at Miercom's labs offer proactive tools for troubleshooting. But one outstanding tool we've seen recently is a T-1 trunk-monitoring tool on an IP PBX system. It not only gave all the particulars on the incoming T-1 (such as line encoding and framing), it also could grab a time slot, place a phone call and give a readout of the call setup. The best part was that it came with the base package at no extra cost.

Use these criteria to structure your questions about a product's management capabilities. Your staff will be especially grateful for the effort.