Network Management is one of those things that Big Companies do. It’s a task often associated with hardware and software that costs six figures and requires lots of special training and experience to operate properly.
In the broadest context, Network Management is about the hardware, software, and techniques that are used for monitoring the health of your network and the devices connected to it. Typically, most smaller companies and people with home networks spend very little, if any, time thinking about these things — until a problem occurs.
That’s why a minimal level of management benefits even the smallest networks. On a small office local-area network (LAN) you may want to ask questions like, “Is the subnet served by the hub in the closet on the second floor congested?” and “How much traffic are we sending out through our Internet connection (and why is our provider charging for more)?” Or maybe, “Are any of our servers running low on memory or disk space?”
Equipped with a basic understanding of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and the right software, you can begin to gather the data you’d need to answer those questions (and others like them). The SNMP Terms and Concepts sidebar, pg. 21, describes some of the terminology that we’ll encounter along the way.
SNMP’s History
During the mid-’80s, system and network administrators commonly used ping, traceroute, tcpdump, and similar command-line utilities to help keep traffic flowing over their networks. These tools were generally…
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