The Changing Face of Network Management

WHITE PAPER: NETWORK MANAGEMENT
The Changing Face of
Network Management
OCTOBER 2007
Pam SnaithCA ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS MANAGEMENTTable of Contents
Executive Summary
SECTION 1 2Keeping up with Changes The Only Thing Certain is ChangeExact Change Only
SECTION 2 3An Opportunity to Change for the Better With Tools, Less is MoreFor a Change of Pace try Automation
SECTION 3 4Benefits of Managing Change
SECTION 4 5It's Time for ChangeCA is Change-Aware
SECTION 5 5Acknowledgements
About the Author
ABOUT CA Back Cover
Copyright © 2007 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only. To the extent permittedby applicable law, CA provides this document "As Is" without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose, or noninfringement. In no event will CA beliable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised of such damages.Executive Summary
Challenge
Managing your network is serious business. It is absolutely essential that it is up and runningsince your critical business services depend on it - and so does your revenue stream. At thesame time, your network continues to grow in size and complexity, with the addition of moredevices 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 eventsoccur - but a considerable amount of disruption can be prevented. Industry analystsagree that erroneous network configuration changes, manually entered, cause a significantportion of network downtime and performance degradation. With that kind of impact,getting change and configuration management under control is critical.
Opportunity
Addressing preventable downtime and degradation is becoming easier, with analysts andvendors focused on network change and configuration management (NCCM). AutomatedNCCM tools provide an opportunity to reduce the downtime and degradation caused byconfiguration changes by ensuring uniform configurations and by minimizing the impactsof 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 faultmanagement solution be change-aware? Integration of NCCM capabilities in faultmanagement "closes the loop" on network problems that stem from configurationchanges. Integration enables correlation of network events to configuration changes andit can also provide a configuration audit trail of any selected network device through thehistory typically retained by fault management tools.
Benefits
Several benefits result from incorporating network configuration change capabilities intochange-aware fault management tools.. First and foremost, downtime and degradation is reduced due to uniform configurations, thereduction 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.
WHITE PAPER: NETWORK MANAGEMENT 1SECTION 1
Keeping up with ChangesThe Only Thing Certain is ChangeToday's complex network infrastructures can contain hundreds or thousands of business-critical devices. Unauthorized or incorrect changes to even a single device can have a ripplingeffect on the health and availability of the network infrastructure. A recent article in NetworkWorld's Network/Systems Management Newsletter suggested that the impact of configurationChange is inevitable, except change on network stability is significant. It stated, "It has become common knowledge thatfrom vending machines. when systems go down, applications stall and networks fail it's usually due to unknown,undocumented or unauthorized changes to network and systems configurations - and notUnknown because of... [download for more]