Network World Fusion Special Report, Network Performance Management:
Three Key Technology Challenges, by Dennis Drogseth (EMA).
"In the current environment, management of network infrastructure
has become fundamentally more complex than ever. This is true because
both the number and complexity of the active elements in networks today
are higher than ever. Simultaneously, components have expanded to
include functions to address needs across a greater variety of
applications and across more layers of the network model."
 Click to view PDF document (270K)
Capturing and Managing the Details by Enterprise Management Associates.
Statseeker has taken an unusual approach to addressing the data volume,
transit, threshold, and analytic issues of "less is more". By focusing
on specific statistical values (OIDs), Statseeker reduces the data
volume while increasing the value of that data and the engineering that
is applied to it.
Since the collected data is limited, statistics can be collected on the
entire network infrastructure and done so more frequently without impacting
the network with the normal volume of over-polled data. This more extensive
visibility into the network and higher frequency also increases the value
of the data by highlighting more relevant trends and more quickly reflecting
sudden changes in the monitored systems and network. Given this focus on
relevance, the result can show a more "actionable" management perspective
on the infrastructure.
This simplicity in data collection has also made Statseeker distinctive in
being able to monitor the entire network and all its components. This
virtually eliminates the need for guessing which devices are critical,
and which are not - which will in any case vary by application and service
environment, as well as by normative changes within increasingly dynamic
IT systems. Statseeker's "blanket monitoring" has historically extended
to environments with as many as 200,000 nodes. By design, Statseeker's
software can scale much larger; however, there are few networks extensive
enough to take the software to its limits.
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The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
As today's networks get larger and more complex, the requirement to collect
large amounts of statistical data on the health of the network is becoming
increasingly important in order to deliver basic network management functions.
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is one of the more widely
utilised technologies in network management solutions. In practice,
SNMP is not as "simple" to implement as one would expect!
This article explores some of the SNMP shortcomings that Statseeker
has identified while developing and deploying our network monitoring
products into large network infrastructures.
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