Computer Network Management

The International Organization for Standards (ISO) categorized the five major functional areas of the Network Management Model as performance management, accounting management, configuration management, fault management and security management.

Abrief synopsis about this below:

Performance Management

It is the monitoring, assessing, and adjusting the available bandwidth and network resource usage in order make a network run more efficiently.

Performance management is a very important part of the network management model particularly to the business and/or organization that wants to streamline their network's performance.

Accounting Management

Accounting management monitors and assesses the usage of data and/or resources for the purpose of billing. This aspect of the network management is by Internet Service Providers to bill customers for the resources they use.

Configuration Management

The configuration network management is tracking the hardware and software versions on the network to identify their effects on the network's operation.

An example of this is Microsoft’s System Management Server (SMS) which has the capability to monitor, manage and track every piece of software and hardware on a given network.

Fault Management

Fault Management is what most people think of when they think of network management. The purpose of this area of network management is to detect, log and alert the system administrators of problems that might effect the systems operations.

Security Management

Security Management deals with controlling the access to resources and even alerting the proper authorities when certain resources are accessed.

Just like network manager can be alerted when a resource goes down, network management systems can be used to send messages when certain files, servers or routers are accessed.

Most of the network management systems use common set of protocols such as Simple Network

Management Protocols (SNMP), SNMPv3, and Common Management Information Protocol (CMIP).

There are many products that support some and even all of these areas of network management