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Notes: Introduction To Networking Monitoring and Management

Network monitoring and management involves collecting data on system resources, performance, and changes. This data is used to ensure availability and reliability, plan for future capacity needs, detect problems and security threats, and maintain an audit trail of network operations. Key goals are to know when issues occur, understand typical network usage patterns, and view long-term trends. Open source tools like Nagios, Cacti, Smokeping and ticket systems help network teams achieve these goals from a Network Operations Center.

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Devendra Chandora
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187 views

Notes: Introduction To Networking Monitoring and Management

Network monitoring and management involves collecting data on system resources, performance, and changes. This data is used to ensure availability and reliability, plan for future capacity needs, detect problems and security threats, and maintain an audit trail of network operations. Key goals are to know when issues occur, understand typical network usage patterns, and view long-term trends. Open source tools like Nagios, Cacti, Smokeping and ticket systems help network teams achieve these goals from a Network Operations Center.

Uploaded by

Devendra Chandora
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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NOTEs

Network Monitoring and


Management

Introduction to Networking
Monitoring and Management
Part I: Overview
Core concepts presented:
–  What is network monitoring
–  What is network management
–  Getting started
–  Why network management
–  The big three
–  Attack detection
–  Documentation
–  Consolidating the data
–  The big picture
Network Management Details
We Monitor
•  System & Services
–  Available, reachable
•  Resources
–  Expansion planning, maintain availability
•  Performance
–  Round-trip-time, throughput
•  Changes and configurations
–  Documentation, revision control, logging
Network Management Details
We Keep Track Of
•  Statistics
–  For purposes of accounting and metering
•  Faults (Intrusion Detection)
–  Detection of issues,
–  Troubleshooting issues and tracking their history

•  Ticketing systems are good at this


•  Help Desks are a useful to critical component
Baselining

What is normal for your network?


If you’ve never measured or monitored your
network you will need to know things like:
–  Typical load on links (è Cacti)
–  Level of jitter between endpoints (è Smokeping)
–  Typical percent usage of resources
–  Typical amounts of “noise”:
•  Network scans
•  Dropped data
•  Reported errors or failures
Why do all this?
Know when to upgrade
-  Is your bandwidth usage too high?
-  Where is your traffic going?
-  Do you need to get a faster line, or more providers?
-  Is the equipment too old?
Keep an audit trace of changes
-  Record all changes
-  Makes it easier to find cause of problems due to
upgrades and configuration changes
Maintain history of network operations
–  Using a ticket system lets you keep a history of events.
–  Allows you to defend yourself and verify what happened
Why network management?
Accounting
–  Track usage of resources
–  Bill customers according to usage
Know when you have problems
-  Stay ahead of your users! Makes you look good.
-  Monitoring software can generate tickets and auto-
matically notify staff of issues.
Trends
–  All of this information can be used to view trends
across your network.
–  This is part of baselining, capacity planning and
attack detection.
Network Management Goals

Availability
–  Nagios Services, servers, routers,
switches
Reliability
–  Smokeping Connection health, rtt, service
response time, latency
Performance
–  Cacti Total traffic, port usage, CPU
RAM, Disk, processes
Functional overlap exists between these programs!
Attack Detection
•  Trends and automation allow you to know
when you are under attack.
•  The tools in use can help you to mitigate
attacks:
–  Flows across network interfaces
–  Load on specific servers and/or services
–  Multiple service failures
Network Operations Center (NOC)

“Where it all happens”


-  Coordination of tasks
-  Status of network and services
-  Fielding of network-related incidents and
complaints
-  Where the tools reside (”NOC server”)
-  Documentation including:
è  Network diagrams
è  database/flat file of each port on each switch
è  Network description
è  Much more as you'll see.
The big picture

- Monitoring Notifications
- Data collection
- Accounting

Ticket
- Change control &
monitoring
- Capacity planning
Ticket
- NOC Tools - Availability
- Ticket system - Trends
- Detect problems
Ticket
Ticket
- Improvements
- Upgrades
Ticket - User complaints
- Requests

- Fix problems
A few Open Source solutions…
Performance Change Mgmt Net Management
l  Cricket l  Mercurial l  Big Brother
l  IFPFM l  Rancid* (routers) l  Cacti*
l  flowc l  CVS* l  Hyperic
l  mrtg* l  Subversion* l  Munin
l  NetFlow* l  git* l  Nagios*
l  NfSen* Security/NIDS l  OpenNMS*
l  ntop l  Nessus l  Observium*
l  perfSONAR l  OSSEC l  Sysmon
l  pmacct l  Prelude l  Zabbix
l  RRDtool* l  Samhain Documentation
l  SmokePing* l  SNORT •  IPplan
Ticketing l  Untangle •  Netdisco
l  RT* Logging •  Netdot*
•  swatch* •  Rack Table
l  Trac*
•  syslog-ng/rsyslog* Protocols/Utilities
l  Redmine
•  tenshi* •  SNMP*, Perl, ping

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