Advanced Network Management Essay

Short for remote monitoring, RMON is a network management protocol that allows network information to be gathered at a single workstation. The RMON has been specially designed to help network manager to understand the operation of the network as a whole and as an individual devices (switches, routers, hosts,) and how its affect its mode of operation. RMON provides network administrators with more freedom in selecting network-monitoring probes and consoles with features that meet their particular networking needs. RMON was defined by the user community with the help of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It became a proposed standard in 1992 as RFC 1271 (for Ethernet) and then became a draft standard in 1995 as RFC 1757, effectively obsoleting RFC 1271. The RMON standard was developed in order to resolve issues that other management protocols were not able to handle it properly and can be supported by hardware monitoring devices (known as â€Å"probes†) or through softw are or some kind of combination. â€Å"For example, any vendor LAN switches includes software in each switch that can trap information as traffic flows through and record it in its MIB. A software agent can gather the information for presentation to the network administrator with a graphical user interface. A number of vendors provide products with various kinds of RMON support. RMON collects nine kinds of information, including packets sent, bytes sent, packets dropped, statistics by host, by conversations between two sets of addresses, and certain kinds of events that have occurred, alarms, history, statistics and much more. A network administrator can find out how much bandwidth or traffic each user is imposing on the network and what Web sites are being accessed. Alarms can be set in order to be aware of impending problems†. (Rouse, 2010) An RMON probe can sometimes be management appliance software or could be in the device that is managed. They can also reside near monitored network elements. The probe analyzes RMON information such as traffic and alarms. RMON probes delegate certain tasks such as collecting statistics, periodic polling, subscribing to certain notifications, and generating threshold-crossing alerts through specific configuration of MIBs. Some advantages of utilizing RMON probes are that they reduce SNMP traffic as well as reduce t he processing load of the clients. They also use periodic polling instead of continual polling which also reduces processes. (Clemm, 2007) References * Clemm, A. Network Management Fundamentals Edition 1 (1st ed). Pearson Learning Solutions. Retrieved from http://devry.vitalsource.com/books/9781256084068/id/ch02lev2sec9 * Waldbusser, S. ((2000, May)2000, May). Rfc 2819. Retrieved from http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2819 * Rouse, M. ((2010, November)2010, November). Rmon (remote network monitoring). Retrieved from http://searchmobilecomputing.techtarget.com/definition/RMON * Javvin. (n.d.). Rmon: remote monitoring mibs (rmon1 and rmon2). Retrieved from http://www.javvin.com/protocolRMON.html