Network management is the process of ensuring that your network works correctly and efficiently. It also helps you identify any errors and fix them quickly to avoid downtime.
As technology advances, networks grow in complexity and size. This makes it more difficult to keep track of all the devices, systems, and applications that need to communicate with each other.
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Security
Network management includes a wide range of tasks to keep networks up and running smoothly. These include fault management, configuration management and monitoring.
Security features of network management protect a company’s network and data from hackers, virus attacks and other threats. They also reduce costs by protecting sensitive data and ensuring that networks can operate efficiently.
Firewalls, for example, monitor and control incoming and outgoing traffic between a trusted internal network and untrusted external ones. They filter traffic based on state, port and protocol to prevent lateral movement of malicious data.
Access controls, on the other hand, limit unauthorized users’ ability to access network resources. These controls use a combination of passwords, user IDs and authentication processes to ensure that only privileged users can gain access to the network.
In addition, a company’s IT infrastructure should be regularly inspected to verify that gray market or illegitimate devices and software are not introducing vulnerabilities into the network. These measures can help organizations minimize the risk of malware, ransomware or spyware infecting their network infrastructure.
Fault Management
The fault management features of network management monitor and identify the causes of problems on a network. These can include anything from software bugs to hardware failures and connectivity issues.
The fault-management workflow involves a set of steps that start with fault detection and end with fault resolution. Faults can be detected through various means, including ICMP pings, SNMP traps, and syslog messages.
Some faults can be prevented, while others require major action. Fault management systems automatically solve these problems by executing programs or scripts that take only a small amount of time and don’t require much manual work on the part of the network administrator.
When a fault occurs, a fault management system notifies the network administrator by sending alarms. The network administrator can then investigate the cause of the problem and take appropriate action.
Configuration Management
Network management tools keep track of configuration data on all hardware devices and software programs in a network. This includes their locations, IP addresses, software versions, updates and settings.
Having this information is essential to maintaining a network, identifying changes, and troubleshooting issues. It can also help to ensure compliance with license agreements and other legal requirements.
Changes to networks and network hardware are often necessary to accommodate new features and improvements. While some changes can be beneficial, other changes could put your network at risk of a security attack or compromise its performance and productivity.
These risks can be reduced through the use of network configuration management (NCM) software. These tools monitor network devices, configure them remotely and push firmware updates to the device if needed. They can also provide backups of changes to enable recovery in case there’s a misconfiguration.
Monitoring
Network monitoring tools help IT administrators keep tabs on how well their networks are functioning. They also monitor traffic and usage patterns to identify potential problems.
Most monitoring systems send alerts after a problem occurs, but an even more advanced system continuously observes your business network and lets you know when something is wrong before it causes a loss in productivity.
Modern enterprise networks span multiple WAN connections, branch offices, data centers and cloud hosts. This means that IT engineers must be able to capture data from every network connection and analyze it to pinpoint the source of any issue.
Many network monitoring solutions use an agent-based architecture. This gives the software access to your hardware and collects detailed information about each device on your network.
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