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Before you rush out and deploy a network management system in a production environment, think about

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network management planning.

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In the lab, such as with GNS3 this is perhaps not as important, but it's very important when doing

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this in the real world.

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Network management planning includes translating business requirements into monitoring needs, thresholds,

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and network performance monitor or NPM configurations.

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Other things to consider with network management planning include building and leveraging reports that

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meet the needs of the various stakeholders, as well as determining and monitoring scope and impact

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on the network.

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And don't forget about the network topology having an impact on the actual monitoring system.

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Translating business requirements means doing things such as surveying key stakeholders and departments

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for their monitoring and reporting needs.

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It also means documenting goals for your network management system, and this really needs to be stressed.

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It's very important that you document the goals of your network management system.

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Otherwise, how do you determine if the network management system deployment has achieved what you set

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out to do?

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An organization may have the goal of increasing the availability of the network.

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However, if you don't document those goals and don't baseline your network before you deploy your network

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management system, how will you determine if the network management system has had a positive effect

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on the network?

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And what it was originally intended to do.

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It's important that your goals be documented before you deploy and in addition, make sure that you

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have a baseline of the network.

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In other words, you have an indication of what the network looks like in its current form before you

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deploy the network management system.

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If you don't do that, how will you know three months from today or six months from today, whether

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the network management system has had a positive effect on the network and has accomplished what it

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was originally intended to do?

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Key measures also include things like data granularity, in other words, how granular or detailed should

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the data be that you're collecting?

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For example, if you are looking at bandwidth utilization on an interface, how often are you importing

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that data?

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Is it once every five minutes or once every five seconds?

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If you only look at the bandwidth utilization of an interface every five minutes, you may miss a spike

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during that five minute interval.

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On the flip side, if you are collecting data every second, you may end up storing a very large amount

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of data.

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Another thing to keep in mind when translating business requirements into monitoring needs is data retention,

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data retention means how long are you going to keep the data that your network management system collected

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before it's either deleted or summarized?

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In other words, how long are you going to keep detailed records of your network before it's deemed

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unnecessary to keep that data or at least that level of detail of the data?

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Other things you're going to want to do in documenting these monitoring needs is to define both the

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needs of the teams involved in projects and the thresholds.

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Now, what thresholds mean is the level at which you want to start seeing error states or paying more

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attention.

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If an interface is running at 25% utilization and then goes up to 50% utilization you

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may not want to be notified of that.

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But when it goes to 90% utilization, you may want to be informed that something's happened on

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your network.

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So you need to decide the thresholds before you get notified of possible problems on your network.

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This becomes important when you build your alerts and configure the different reports available in NPM.

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NPM of course has many options and settings that you can change based on your network as well as

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your business requirements.