Compaq 167050-001 Compaq Netelligent Network Management Overview - Page 7

043A/0996 NETWORK MANAGEMENT OVERVIEW (cont'd) ... THE NETWORK MANAGEMENT DIVIDEND So what does network management really mean to your business, and what kind of return on your investment can you expect? Each time a network management application prevents a failure, detects and solves a potential problem, or increases performance, you have gained a network management "dividend." These dividends translates into money in the form of time and resources. Figure 7 - Impact of Network Management HOW NETWORK MANAGEMENT WORKS Network management employs a standard called Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). SNMP consists of two important components: agents and managers. An agent is software or firmware included with a network device, such as a repeater or router. The agent monitors a device's operation, but does nothing else unless it detects an error or is polled for information. Software agents can be installed on PCs to report information such as available hard disk space, memory usage and which applications are loaded. A manager is a sophisticated software application that collects and processes information from many agents. It polls certain agents for information at regular intervals or only when requested. The manager/agent relationship is similar to an office administrator and employees. The administrator may occasionally ask an employee, "How is your report coming along?" to which the employee might respond, "It's finished." Ideally, each employee answers favorably. Occasionally, the administrator may find that one or two employees may not have completed the work or were not present to answer the question. The administrator records these occurrences as faults and reports them to a higher authority. In both cases, the employee (agent) waits for the administrator (manager) to initiate the conversation (polling). As another example, an employee might call the administrator to say that he cannot find the information necessary to complete his report. In this situation, the employee (agent) initiates the conversation by reporting a problem (trap) before the administrator (manager) makes an inquiry. The relationship of the manager and agents is illustrated in Figure 8. A device's agent is typically accessed using a management information base Figure 8 - The Manager/Agent Relationship (MIB). A MIB contains devicespecific information that helps the management software work with an agent. Typically, when you add a device to a network, you must load the device's MIB into the management software to manage the device. 7