In the past few years, the responsibilities shouldered by corporate IT department managers have changed significantly: on the one hand, the scale and complexity of the company's network have increased exponentially, and more and more new businesses have been ported to the network environment to operate; on the other hand, various business departments and external customers in the company are increasingly relying on the network to complete daily business processing and communications, and any network or service interruption or even performance degradation will have a serious impact on the company's business. At the same time, in order to adapt to the harsh competition of the market economy, controlling IT investment and operational costs has also become a topic that IT department managers need to consider.
In order to ensure the normal operation of enterprise business, leaders of almost all large and medium-sized enterprises in China have realized the importance of building network management systems, and most enterprises have invested and purchased corresponding network management software based on their current management needs, hoping to improve the work efficiency of IT managers and improve the availability and service level of enterprise networks and business systems. The most common network management software used in domestic enterprise environments now include network topology management software, fault collection and alarm management software, and network performance management software.
However, looking at the usage and application level of network management systems in today's domestic enterprise environment, the overall situation is not very satisfactory. The more prominent shortcomings are the following:
◆There is a general lack of planning for the long-term goals of network management system construction. Enterprises often purchase some independent management tools or software systems according to their usage needs in different periods to manage equipment, network, failures, performance or application systems. This method can easily cause the management data between the various modules in the management system to lack integration, the comprehensive processing of the management information of the entire system, and the root cause of the failure cannot be found.
◆ Pay attention to the procurement of network management software/hardware, and underestimate the operation training of network management center management personnel. Operators who lack training often cannot fully customize and reasonably customize network management software, making the system management functions unable to be close to the specific management needs of each enterprise to the greatest extent, resulting in many functions of the network management system being unable to perform reasonable functions and unable to fully improve the work efficiency of managers.
◆ Pay attention to monitoring and managing network failures and network performance indicators, and underestimate all-round monitoring of the company's core business service levels. This is easy to cause management omissions, such as security attacks, improper parameter configuration, and failure to meet the requirements of the service level agreement (Service Level Agreement) to the core business of the enterprise cannot operate efficiently and stably.
New technology for network management
As one of the most rapidly developing technical fields in recent years, network technology has also had many outstanding technological progress in network management. Here we will give you a brief introduction.
Trend of intelligent management of network equipment
Nowadays, network equipment produced by mainstream network equipment suppliers generally provide embedded intelligent management agents for equipment. These management agents can conduct comprehensive monitoring of network devices themselves, and realize management functions including device parameter configuration verification, measurement and early warning of security attacks, different levels of service communication traffic/flow statistics, and end-to-end measurement of service performance.
The emergence of embedded intelligent management agents has first largely replaced the external network performance monitoring probes (Probes) that are often purchased in the original network management system. Administrators no longer have to worry about installing these external probes to occupy additional network ports or change the network topology. These will reduce the overall investment in network management systems, especially for some large enterprises. In addition, the built-in intelligent management agent can turn each network device into a distributed management information collection workstation, and can conduct preliminary summary and analysis of the collected management information, and then only send the summary statistics to the network management server. This can also reduce the need for the network management server processing capabilities and the complexity of the network management software, thereby further reducing the overall investment in the network management system.
The emergence of programmable management system interface
When exchanging management information between traditional network management systems and managed devices and network management systems, three major types of management interfaces are mainly used:
◆ Simple network management protocol communication interface, mainly used to transmit fault, performance, and event information between managed equipment and management system. The SNMP interface standards commonly used now include V1, V2c and V3.
◆ The CLI command line interface is mainly used to manage the system to send parameter configuration/backup, service activation, status query and other instructions to the managed device. Different manufacturers' equipment or different models of devices from the same manufacturer have different CLI command line interfaces.
◆ CORBA protocol interface is mainly used to integrate data communication and management functions between management systems. Network management systems of different manufacturers may use different versions of CORBA protocol interfaces.
Since it is necessary to support multiple management interfaces at the same time or even multiple versions in each management interface, it will inevitably lead to an increase in the complexity of the management system and a decrease in compatibility with managed devices/management systems, which will cause obstacles to the enterprise's construction of a unified and efficient management system.
In order to solve the chaotic situation of coexistence of multiple management interfaces/versions in network management systems, led by international standardization organizations such as IETF, the industry has reached a consensus on the unified management system interface, and the basis of the unified management interface has been determined as XML technology.
The communication interface of the network management system based on XML technology has many advantages. First of all, XML technology is an international standard that can effectively unify the multiple management interfaces present in existing network systems. Secondly, XML technology has strong flexibility and can fully control the embedded management agent of network equipment, ensure complex interactive communication and operations between management systems and management systems and managed devices, and realize many management operations that cannot be achieved by the original management interface. Moreover, since the XML technology itself adopts a simple and clear markup language, it can be implemented relatively easily during the development and integration of management systems. In this way, the adoption of new management interfaces will reduce the development cost of the entire management system.
Now all Cisco's network devices and most network management systems have begun to support new management interfaces based on XML technology. Using the XML management interface, the network management system can easily communicate with the parameter configuration management agent embedded in Cisco devices: the network management system sends a set of programmable configuration command scripts to multiple network devices at the same time, and the configuration management agent of each device parses and verifys the command scripts separately, and finally implements them uniformly. Using the XML management interface, the network management system can also realize the operation of reading fault information and equipment working status from the managed device. The adoption of new management interfaces can greatly improve the ability and efficiency of management information exchange between management software, including third-party management software and Cisco network equipment, and can easily achieve integration with Cisco management systems.
Trends in network management system construction
Unified planning and step-by-step implementation
The construction of a network management system should first serve the overall business goals of the enterprise, that is, not only to ensure the stable operation of the enterprise network, but more importantly, to ensure the efficient and stable operation of the business system carried on the network. This determines that the construction of enterprise network management systems must have a long-term and complete business goal, and should not be limited to management that meets the specific needs of the network itself.
In order to achieve the above long-term management goals, enterprises should consider a number of management needs such as centralized monitoring of network failures and performance when planning to build their own network management system; rapid opening of business systems and network QoS configuration; network security control; business traffic flow analysis and business end-to-end service level monitoring. Due to investment restrictions or changes in network size, a network management system containing complete management functions mentioned above may not be completed in one go. Each enterprise should first choose the most needed management functions to implement based on its actual business conditions, but it must ensure that the management modules purchased and built in advance meet the long-term business goals of the enterprise network management system, and try to cooperate with network management system providers with long-term business expansion capabilities. The management system modules purchased in advance should be reserved with an open and feasible system integration interface to facilitate future integration with other management modules. At this stage, network management modules with integrated interfaces based on XML technology should be used as much as possible.
At the same time, when purchasing or developing network management systems, enterprises should also pay attention to choosing management software that can make full use of a variety of new network management technologies. For example, management software that can support the embedded intelligent management agent function of network equipment should be selected to ensure that the management system can play the full role of the new network equipment, reduce the overall cost of ownership of the management system, and reduce the impact of management system construction on the network.
Emphasize business SLA monitoring and management capabilities, and focus on root cause analysis of failures
In order to further improve the level of network management and effectively reflect the contribution of effective network management to enterprise operation and business development, in recent years, the construction of network management systems has increasingly integrated the attention to enterprise business SLA monitoring and management. Administrators no longer focus on network management from the perspective of ensuring network connectivity and network performance. They are devoted to end-to-end SLA guarantees for enterprise business, emphasizing improving service availability and ensuring that the root cause of the failure can be quickly identified when business interruptions occur, and reducing the average fault repair time.
In order to reflect the new trend in the construction of the above-mentioned network management system, many domestic and foreign network management system providers have now added service end-to-end SLA monitoring management module and root cause analysis management module to their respective network management systems. Most of the service end-to-end SLA monitoring functions are implemented by supporting IP SLA management agents embedded in Cisco network devices: Each Cisco network device in the network can regularly measure and count business service quality between any two points in the network according to the configuration of the management system. The IP SLA management agent supports measurement of a wide range of parameters and indicators, which can measure different types of services (such as VoIP, streaming media, data services, Internet services, SNA services, etc.) or communication traffic of different priority levels, such as network end-to-end one-way/two-way delay, packet loss rate, jitter, transmission error rate and other indicators. The management system can regularly or in real time collect measurement results of the service SLA and generate service quality statistical reports for the service.
The focus of the business failure root cause analysis management module is on the integration of management data and the accuracy of management information models. Each management module needs to summarize the management information of each subsystem in the enterprise network into a data processing platform, and the data platform uniformly conducts management information modeling and data correlation analysis. This determines that the network management system should have very high integration. When building a new network management system, enterprises recommend using XML-based data interfaces to achieve data integration between management modules. Only when the network management system can collect sufficient relevant information can it accurately evaluate the fundamental cause of the failure caused by business interruption by conducting correlation analysis of the management data of multiple information sources.
Summarize
The construction of network management systems is a topic that has attracted more and more attention from corporate management. In order to better play the investment efficiency of network management systems and improve the competitiveness of enterprises in the Internet economy era. Enterprise IT supervisors need to re-examine the construction direction of the network management system to avoid common misunderstandings: make reasonable long-term planning for the construction of the network management system; make full use of new technologies to optimize the network management system oriented management; cooperate with powerful software developers; and conduct regular training of management system operators to ensure that the network management system can fully play its due management effects.