Businesses today work mostly in a 24x7 mode and network management is a crucial aspect to maintain the workflow in an organization. Traditional, network management consisted of monitoring network links and networking equipments. However, over a period of time, it has matured and more business driven services such as business and IT alignment, network impact analysis, service availability and configuration management come under its ambit. Today, NMS includes development and usage of re-usable components to have a uniform platform, to build applications on a single point configuration and management operation.

Evolution
Networks, which were set up 3-4 years ago, had limited options – bandwidth availability options were only 64K or 2Meg and nothing in between. Now with the advent of new technologies like MPLS and the influx of multiple service providers, organizations are attempting to derive the best out of these changes. Converged networks are also on the rise. Organizations are looking to leverage their existing infrastructure and investment by incorporating new technologies such as video and video transfers on existing networks.

Today, network management builds upon basic network management such as fault and performance to include, configuration management, change management, compliance management, application availability management and application response time management. Secondly, uptimes have ceased to become a significant concern for customers. With the network infrastructure being expected to support multiple applications, business users are demanding consistent and predictable response times for critical applications.

Apart from that organizations have started realizing that their bandwidth requirement during peak periods of the month and year is significantly different from the non-peak periods. The critical question now for them is that can they subscribe to differentiate levels of service aligned to their business requirements. As networks become bigger and more sophisticated, there is a growing need for more powerful and simple-to-use NM solutions to manage networks. The current focus areas are integration (workflow, portal, etc), usability and supporting wider variety of networks and devices.

Networks today have come a long way and have acquired varied technologies. Outsourcing network management and control systems requirements has enabled enterprises to grow and focus on core businesses. Most organizations today go for the managed services partner that can provide customized services with state-of-the-art tools for managing network.

Services
The industry describes the basic functionalities of network management by FCAPS.  FCAPS is the ISO telecommunications management network model and the acronym for fault, configuration, accounting (or administration), performance, and security, which defines the basic network management tasks.  Normally, you won't find all the five functionalities in a single product. For optimazation, vendors will focus on just one or two of those requirements in a product. Thus, it is not uncommon to have various different NM products running in an organization.

Network management companies today do network planning and optimization, ensure application availability and acceleration, monitor and manage network application performance, collect traffic and other data, manage incidents and problems and ensure strong reporting. With several new applications like Internet telephony, unified messaging and IP VPNs over wired and wireless networks, there is a lot of concern over the performance and sturdiness of networks. Managing these varied network deployments and applications to ensure application acceleration and availability is becoming very complex. There has been a double-digit growth in triple play applications stemming from office-sanctioned traffic such as VOIP/Tele presence and unsanctioned traffic from P2P, voice enabled messenger/Skype, etc.

Network management services consist of simple scalability, integration at various levels, supporting higher network abstractions, supporting network in a box, multi-vendor devices, etc. One of the key growth area is security information management. Management system correlation, Web-based network management, increased focus on QoS and performance management are the other areas which need to be enhanced further. A1 based event correlation, cross domain correlation, root cause analysis, root analytics, network configuration management, VOIP service assurance, VPN management are some of the trends associated with NMS.

Converged networks are driving organizations to look for 24x7 availability of experts to manage network and application issues. Organizations are beginning to demand service guarantees in terms of application performance, and the industry is gearing up to meet these requirements. The demand for network management is higher in converged networks due to the need to manage real time traffic. In the past SLA was based on transactional traffic, which required application response times of 1 to 2 sec.

Organizations are realizing that a large part of their network, security and applications infrastructure can be managed remotely leading to significant cash savings, without sacrificing controllability and integrity of critical and strategic services resources. As organizations diminish the difference between systems and network expertise, they are looking to access relevant expertise and knowledge when they need it, round the clock.

Another important aspect of NMS is service impact analysis, an advanced form of fault and performance management. It can predict the impact of the probable unavailability of components on the services that are being offered to customers. This helps in understanding the criticality of the components and doing better planning in terms of capacity, availability and executing change request at appropriate time. It generates a comprehensive report about potential and actual services resources that are impacted by a fault. It is also possible to create 'what if' scenarios to simulate impact of a fault on services resources. This is an extremely critical phase of network management as it enables an ample response to the impact on services due to any fault, and ensures that all impacted resources are remedied.

Unfortunately, it is more hype then reality from the standpoint of managing this. The tools today are simply not sophisticated enough to manage this in a realistic fashion.