Network Management system

What is the Best NMS , What NMS to Go with , Which NMS is Best for my Organization ???????????

These are the questions wrecking your head when your organization decide to buy or move to any other NMS , here are some information I will put in and keep on updating it .

First and Foremost There is no specific network monitoring tool which can be said to be the best.. Hahaha I know what you guys are thinking at teh moemnt .

Most of them are preety good and provide you with the information you need on day to day basis.It actually depends upon what you are looking for in a monitoring tool like

• COST ($$$$$) you are willing to pay
  

For a small network, you would do well with a small tool and even with open source, but for a bigger network you would naturally go for higher-end products.

• Easy to use
  

Easy to use and can extract the reports or information you are looking for

Concord, HPOV, Unicenter TNG, Tivoli and SOlarwinds are some of the good tools that I have worked with.


Here are Some Pre Purchase checklist of NMS Applications , Normally these are the areas where NMS Vendors trick us ....

• Root Cause Analysis

True Root cause analysis Means that your NMS is capable to Look through 1000 of events and point out the main cause of the problem . I.e if one router interface is the reasone of whole site failure then NMS should point out this interface is the main reasone that we cannot see any other device in remote office.Event corelation , component monitoring for critical arams are the key fac tors that help in adding real Root cause analysis capability in the NMS

Inorder to do root cause analysis NMS must have collected sufficient data about the networj beaviours and see which Devices are dependent on whihc one. Finally deviation or anomaty can help in proper root acuse analysis .

• SNMP Capable..

Most NMS claim that there appliaction is SNMP capable. they dont mention they are only offering simple SNMP GET requests which only ask a network device to return the current value of a (OID), such as "Packets out" i.e 12000 and of corse you cannot do much with this information However Real NMS produces appropriate information by processiong values from IOD like Bandwidth utilization Normally using forula to calculate this

(Total Octates IN + total Octates OUT) * 8 / 1024 = Bandwidth

So be sure to check the whole process how NMS works with OID's and dont get screwed ... :) by puchasing only SNMP get based NMS

Q. Does ASA support SNMPv3?

A. Yes. Cisco ASA Software Release 8.2 supports Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) version 3, the newest version of SNMP, and adds authentication and privacy options in order to secure protocol operations.

Ref:- Cisco.com