After you design your network to provide adequate bandwidth to your business processes, applications, and users, you need to design additional systems so your network continues to function as designed with growth and other business change. This involves routine maintenance, monitoring and troubleshooting problems, and developing upgrade paths in an iterative process. Sufficient planning for network management ensures that you have the right processes, tools, and infrastructure to maintain and grow your network resources as your business demands.
These checklists help you plan a network that meets your needs.
| Before you begin | |
|---|---|
| __ | Have a completed network plan that includes software, hardware, remote access, security, performance, and availability. |
| __ | Identify all administrators who are responsible for managing administrative subdivisions within the network. |
| Network management planning tasks | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| __ | Plan for a network management
protocol Because Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is the most widely used management protocol, every family of servers includes an SNMP agent. The SNMP agent provides a framework that enables information that is stored in hosts and in the Management Information Base (MIB) to affect changes in the network. Several network management software packages include SNMP as a foundational architecture. These tools vary by software operating system. In addition to SNMP, IBM® includes an implementation of the Common Information Model (CIM) with every family of servers. CIM is a vendor-neutral and technology-neutral model for describing and accessing data across an enterprise. Using CIM, you can write systems management applications by using a single model for communicating with different IT resources. To learn more about CIM, see the Common Information Model topic in the IBM Systems Software Information Center. |
||
| __ | Develop a network management
strategy Network management is critical, but it add a cost on
the network. Network monitoring, which is designed to enhance network performance
and availability, requires network resources that can slow down a network.
Therefore, an adequate network management strategy enables strong management
without causing performance or availability problems. These tasks should all
be part of your network management strategy:
To learn more about managing your network, see the chapters on
network management in the IP Network Design Guide. |
||
When you have completed these tasks, you should have a network management plan that identifies these elements:
| After you finish | |
|---|---|
| __ | Record a network management strategy. |
| __ | Record a test procedure to ensure that you have adequate software to manage your network resources on implementation. |