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To provide:
- Performance Tuning – Improve service – proactively id & reduce bottlenecks, tune and optimize systems, improve QOS, optimize investments – id under/over utilized resources, balance workloads
- Trouble Shooting – Get out of crisis mode, id probs & start diagnosis/fixing before end user notices, increase reliability/availability, allow user to accomplish work more effectively and maximize productivity.
- Planning – understand performance trends for planning
- Expectations – set expectations for the Distributed System (from network thru applications) and see how well they are met
- Security
- Accounting
What’s Changed that Makes Monitoring so Crucial now
- Distributed environment (client/server)
- Critically relies on network to function.
- very different from central environment, yet users expect as good or better
Comparison of Old Environment to Distributed Environment
Mainframe/Workstation
Distributed Environment
One OS
Many OSs & dist. sys. services
One local file system
Multiple distributed file systems
In “Glass House”
All over site, mods by people with varying skills & responsibilities
Mature diagnostics with vendor call in
Roll your own diagnostics & reports
- Network growth:
- Extent/coverage of network increasing
- Number of devices increasing exponentially (30-50% / year is typical)
- Traffic doubling typically every 10-18 months
- Technology to manage network is not growing as fast as network technology
- Complexity:
- a typical ESnet site has:
- products from about ten vendors, suppliers, carriers
- ~ a dozen different configurable equipment types (routers, bridges, hubs, switches …)
- ~ half dozen network management applications (NMS, trouble ticket, probe management …)
- ~ 9 different vendor MIBs
- 5 protocol suites (TCP/IP, DEC, AppleTalk, Netware,…_) typically routing 4 protocols, bridging 3 and tunnelling 2.
- 9 server platforms (VMS, MacOS, AIX, SunOS, WNT …)
- ~ 30 networked applications
- this results in:
- decreased support effectiveness
- decreased QOS
- inability to support existing & new applications
- increased downtime, lost opportunity, user’s time wasted & security exposures
- Reduced Resources:
- budgets increasingly constrained
- few experienced personnel available, hard to retain after training So need simple to use, well integrated tools to automate network management and improve the productivity of existing personnel
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