The
advantage of this layered approach is that NMS can be
more manageable and scaleable to cope with network growth.
By
adding more servers to each layer, the processing power
of each layer can be expanded.
Application Performance Monitoring
Nowadays,
mission critical applications are more dependent on
the quality of network environment, it is important
to monitor not only the availability of the network
but also the health, performance of network devices
as well as response time of the applications servers.
The NMS can meet these requirements by collecting and
processing application performance information - especially
from user perspectives.
With
the installation of small agent software into client
workstations, the application response time, network
delay and throughput of most IP based application/services
can be measured and recorded.
With
prolonged use of the application with monitoring, the
trend of the application response time, network delay,
server loading and throughput can be easily obtained,
thus provides network management and server administrators
with valuable information in traffic base lining, troubleshooting
and capacity planning.
Conclusion
As
can be seen, the deployment of NMS does help network
administrators not only to monitor the day-to-day network
status but also provide real-time alarm, capacity planning
and detailed reporting function. In addition, with the
application monitoring function, the NMS provides a
clear view of how a network application behaves along
the network access path; from clients, networks to application
servers. Combining the network and application monitoring
capabilities, we now have a total network management
solution for our campus network.