Chapter 10. Management Integration: Putting the Pieces Together

As we saw in earlier chapters, managing a network involves a great variety of functions—from monitoring devices in the network to provisioning services, from diagnosing networking problems to planning for optimum network performance, from detecting security breaches to assessing the impact of planned network maintenance on existing services and customers.

One of the challenges in network management—indeed, some would argue, the “holy grail” in network management—lies in providing operational support infrastructure and management systems that are integrated. This means that all management functionality that is required for everything that needs to be managed is provided in one holistic solution, as opposed to providing the functionality in multiple, separate parts that essentially form separate islands. Having multiple management islands can cause many problems that could be avoided with an integrated solution: Data needs to be maintained redundantly and can run out of synch, training cost increases for operational staff that needs to be familiar with a multitude of systems, and management tasks fall through the cracks.