24: Network Management

“When we ignore experimentation and avoid contact with the reality, we hamper progress.”—Walter Tichy."All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." - Galileo Galilei"When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it." - Lord Kelvin.Lecture outline: how to use network management (SNMP-based) tools for performance evaluation?

1. SNMP framework

Management framework: manager and agents

Management Information Base (MIB)

MIB-II (RFC 1213); Host Resources MIB; RMON MIB; Enterprise MIBs

Structure of Management Information (SMI): language for defining MIBs

Object attributes: Name, Encoding, Type of Object

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)

SNMP PDU; Getting/ setting SNMP info

2. Some SNMP-based tools

Multi-router Traffic Grapher (MRTG)

RRDTool

SNMP based Internet weather

NMS software: Nagios, OpenNMS, Cacti

Primary reference for this lecture:

“Network Performance Toolkit: Using Open Source Testing Tools”, by Richard Blum