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Network Management on $1.19 a Day
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February 6, 2003
By Bruce Boardman and Andy Woods
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Want network management without promising CFO Rumpelstiltskin your firstborn? Most network-management product vendors spin fairy tales wherein you live happily ever after ... for a few bags of gold and lots of toil.
But it doesn't have to be that way. If you're willing to prioritize and limit your management goals--admittedly not an easy task--you can have your happy ending and some cash left over.
With this in mind we set out to test network-management applications that could support 1,000 nodes for $10,000--a reasonable proposition, we thought. The problem, of course, is that network management wants to control everything. Look at the FCAPS model: fault, configuration, accounting, performance and security. By emphasizing this "manage everything" model, full-blown network-management suites attempt to understand and represent the many separate things that make up a network--all of which behave quite differently--in a consolidated way. This requires modeling, abstraction and object orientation. It's not simple to do or understand, and it's a prime reason network management takes a ton of time and money.
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Products that address a specific problem tend to be more efficient, easier to use and less expensive. Of course, the flip side is that network-management applications providing such simplification also offer fewer niceties. On the other hand, scaled-down versions of higher-end management products, available at greatly reduced prices, wave a magic wand at just about any FCAPS puzzle piece yet are limited in functionality.
These limitations partly revolve around what can--or can't--be done with SNMP. As a standard, SNMP is widely installed and leveraged by network-management vendors but is primarily limited to addressing the fault and performance portions of FCAPS. Frankly, even expensive network-management products are hamstrung when they rely solely on SNMP data, which is why many have proprietary agents. However, no matter what their cost, most fault and performance products do offer significant monitoring, diagnostic and planning capabilities.
Still, if you figure you're going to lose something by going with a midrange management application, you're right. You won't get high-availability and redundancy features or common object models for $10,000. Distributed event-stream filtering and correlation are out too. But you can get distributed-computing functions, like Web publishing interfaces and distributed polling.
Topological Layer 2 root cause or dynamic impact analysis? Nope. But you will get simple event and alarm management, plus these apps offer performance management, with surprising depth and ease in some cases.
Take note, however, that you won't find security accounting or configuration. This isn't surprising--packages that cover these areas are expensive and complex. Total security can't be had for less than $10,000. In fact, some say it can't be obtained even for a king's ransom (see "Secure to the Core").
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