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The Changing Face of Network Management |
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Tuesday, 30 October 2007 |
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Overview
Managing your network is serious business. It is absolutely
essential that it is up and running since your critical business
services depend on it — and so does your revenue stream. At the same
time, your network continues to grow in size and complexity, with the
addition of more devices and new technologies, in response to business
growth and demands.
Preventing network downtime and performance
degradation is every IT manager’s goal. Causes are not always
preventable — major power outages and other external events occur — but
a considerable amount of disruption can be prevented. Industry analysts
agree that erroneous network configuration changes, manually entered,
cause a significant portion of network downtime and performance
degradation. With that kind of impact, getting change and configuration
management under control is critical.
Addressing preventable downtime and degradation is becoming
easier, with analysts and vendors focused on network change and
configuration management (NCCM). Automated NCCM tools provide an
opportunity to reduce the downtime and degradation caused by
configuration changes by ensuring uniform configurations and by
minimizing the impacts of human error inherent in manual configuration
changes. Independent NCCM tools, however, are not enough on their own.
With
so many network faults caused by configuration changes, shouldn’t your
fault management solution be change-aware? Integration of NCCM
capabilities in fault management “closes the loop” on network problems
that stem from configuration changes. Integration enables correlation
of network events to configuration changes and it can also provide a
configuration audit trail of any selected network device through the
history typically retained by fault management tools.
Several benefits result from incorporating network configuration change capabilities into change-aware fault management tools.
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First and foremost, downtime and degradation is reduced due to uniform
configurations, the reduction of human error and a fast correlation of
network faults to configuration changes.
- Finding the root cause of the fault is easier, resulting in faster mean time to repair (MTTR).
- Service level objectives can be more reliably met.
- The automation inherent in NCCM software reduces the load on IT staffs.
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