Network Management System Overview-
Today’s network management system (NMS) provides advanced fault and performance management functionality across critical IT resources such as routers, WAN links, swithches, firewalls, VOIP call paths, physical servers, virtual servers, domain controllers and other IT infrastructure devices.
An NMS is a set of hardware and software utilities used to manage networks. Basically NMS provides a set of functionalities as Fault tolerance, Configuration assistance, Accounting assistance, performance management and security management. Each of the above functionalities are described in depth below.
Earlier network management use to handle a lot of simple cases as monitoring the status of the devices, whether they are running fine or down, but now the NMS are quite sophisticated and do a lot more functionalities then just monitoring the network devices. NMS has advanced hardware and software to analysis and find out the performance bottlenecks and provide reports, are able to find out any fault in the network devices and able to provide proper graphical reports. NMS is able to deal with bandwidth allocation by load balancing. Network Management systems adopt various cryptographic algorithms for key distribution authorization. NMS also handles security management and configuration management.

NMS devices monitor and collect data from all the network components and analyze the data for all the mentioned functioalities described as above.

Major Functionalities of an NMS

1. Performance monitoring (Network and Server).

Network Performance
● Monitor availability and performance, analyze traffic usage and manage configurations for routers, switches, firewalls, WAN accelerators, wireless access points.
Server Performance
● Monitor server performance across multiple OSes; Supports monitoring Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP UX, IBM AIX servers (leverages SNMP, WMI & CLI for monitoring).
● Monitor server virtualization; Supports VMware and Hyper-V: Monitors over 100 deep performance metrics by leveraging VMware’s API and WMI.
● Monitor essential Microsoft services or applications viz. Exchange monitoring,Active
Directory monitoring, MS SQL monitoring.
● Monitor Servers for CPU, Memory and Disk Utilization, Services, Windows Services, Processes, Custom scripts, URLs (HTTP⁄ HTTPs), Files⁄ Folders at no extra cost.
NMS helps fixing network issues by identifying and resolving the issues.
● Spot network hiccups proactively. Get alerted through email, text message to your mobile phone etc.
● Process network events viz., Windows event log monitoring, syslog monitoring & SNMP trap monitoring.
● Helps in network troubleshooting with wide collection of useful Network monitoring tools

Load testing is also falls under Performance management- ensures that potential problems in your website can be dealt with before they bring down your web resources. network load can be monitored by these tools as shown in the below figure.

2. Fault and event management by network utility to communicate issues. ● Spot network hiccups proactively. Get alerted through email, text message to your mobile phone etc. ● Process network events viz., Windows event log monitoring, syslog monitoring & SNMP trap monitoring.
● Helps in network troubleshooting with wide collection of useful Network monitoring tools

3. Configuration Management.
NMS provides configuration management functionality. Means it can monitor network configuration and system configuration information. Then it can handle the network operations according to the configuration based on the versions of hardware and software utilities used.

4. Security Management.
Network management system handles security of the network devices. This manages or controls the access to the various network devices or resources based on the security or role assigned to the respective users. Security management can handle the user access. For example it can monitor whether a particular user can log to monitor the network devices or not.
5. Accounting Management.
Network Management system has separate set of utilities for account management. This functionality used to find various network usages. Those network usage details/parameters can be used so that users on the network can be managed appropriately for accounting. basic functionality of Accounting management is to measure the utilization of all network utilities. By analyzing these network utilization parameters, the current usage patters can be decided. There are various Network tools for monitoring the network resource utilization as Cisco NetFlow and Cisco IP Accounting.

Vendor specific offerings-

Other than the above functionalities some vendor provides more functionality that can cater to different requirements. I have provided some examples of these below.

● CA NSM also provides IPV6 Support ● CA NSM also provides Integrated, advanced Active Directory Management ● Some vendors like HP and others provide support for the latest technology as cloud computing and datacenter virtualization. ● Neural Star provides real time intelligence ● CA NSM provides main frame support

References-

1. http://www.monolith-software.com/solutions/network-management.php 2. http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/126/NMS_bestpractice.pdf