Emerging Developments In Network Management

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

First of all before an explanation of the emerging network management tools a foundation of knowledge need to be set about the existing network management tools. Network management tools enable the network and systems administrators to monitor how well their network is running. The software usually scans the network and collects any hardware, software and system configuration and also network device configurations but to do this the administrative machine needs to have the (SNMP) Simple network management protocol running. This protocol is the one used to gather this information from all network devices. To make use of this information we need to use software that can make use of the information transported in the SNMP data packet this software is called network management software but before the SNMP data packet can be gained from the host computer it must responded to IMCP or known as "ping". Network Management software has been made by various companies but some will be named for example Solar winds, Ipswich’s Inc. what’s up gold. This type software has many features which such as how the network is performing also the status on any host machine or hardware that is part of the network you are monitoring.

This is because the SNMP protocol carries more data than a standard IMCP packet. An IMCP or ping carries a small amount of data in the reply that is received from the destination this includes how many milliseconds it took to reach it destination and get back also each of these ping/IMCP packet will have a set time to live windows sets this as 128 hops if their no reply the packet is counted as lost and the destination is unreachable which leads to the last part of information the IMCP packet carries the amount of packet loss in the network this proto provide very basic but useful information when troubleshooting the network and it traffic flow etc. (1)

The SNMP protocol carries more information in the packet as this protocol goes in deep on the network devices and gather information in details this includes the following information CPU utilization, RAM Usage, Hard disk utilization and overall hardware performance also per Network interface traffic and the number of error and many more that was some of the featured information that SNMP protocol can carry. But with all this information the management team can monitor and prevent faults from happening on the network which in turn will make the network more stable and reliable. But also can be a burden if this protocol is not used with care or the network has weak security and if a hacker gains any access and hold any of this information the protocol carries whey will be able to find the entire inventory of devices on the network and will be able to target the resource they are after. So this protocol must be secured there are many way to secure it one way of doing this is to separate the traffic into vlans so the management will have a separate VLAN that will transport all the various management traffics including SNMP data traffic to and from the devices another is the use of firewalls to single out the SNMP protocol traffic or even upgrade the SNMP protocol to version 3 in the version is allows encryption of the packet. (1)

Network management software doesn’t just use these to protocols to retrieve information about the devices on the network it uses other tools. But there are other tools that can be used to monitor a network and it performance.

Tools such as wire shark can be used to monitor the traffic in real-time and any unauthorised packet will be displayed if the filter have been set properly this can help keep the network stable because if the network administrative team find a fragmented packet it can be traced back to the source and blocked with other tools such as a security software, a firewall Access Control lists etc. but it does have it limited when I comes to the wireless and VPN (virtual private networks ) side of networking this may be due to the encryption on the VPN tunnel and for the wireless possible a lack of support for the range of wireless devices . (2)

Other tools that can be very useful especially when the network has a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and BYON (Bring Your Own Network) an IP address scanner and manager that populates the IP addresses that has been used on the network provided administrator have specified an IP address range and the software will scan this range and all address that have been taken and are in use the hostname of the device will be shown if available but this is done with the ping command but repeated a number of times to a different IP address to see if the host it up or down and form this information the IP scanner is able to tell if the IP address is in use. This software will be useful if you are making an inventory of the network device that is in the companies’ IP address space an example of software that does this is Solar Winds IP address manager. (3)

Another tool that is essential for monitoring a network and it device whether it is a router, switch, hub, server, desktop pc, laptops, mobile devices, access point or printers any hardware that is a able to communication on the network on any medium. The use of the MIB Browser is essential when it comes to this. An MIB browser is able to read the SNMP packet at a better depth and make it human readable it also allow the network management team to make definitions so that its own databases become more knowledgeable of the other devices on the network or download MIB definition of the IEEE SNMP MIB database and lastly it can be used to create basic alarm management for example if a device performance has degraded the network team can rectify the problem before something happens. With some MIB Browsers you can manage the SNMP v3 agents. The Agent in a typical network scenario is the router or the gateway device. (4) Here is one of many MIB browsers available it is made by a company called Unleash networks the software name is Unbrowse SNMP R.1.6 (4)

Another tools that can be used in network management is the use of scripts that network managers or system administrators can use to configure the network automatically without the network visit each machine to give It an IP address tell it where the dns server is and the gateway etc. but instead use a script to do this also the network management administrators can attach a scripts to each user or user group and made to run at log on this could be to connect each user to the relevant resources on the network or the access control to specified areas of the local machine. Not only can scripts be used for this but they can also be used to connect to a group of devices and retrieve the SNMP information from them. Only thing is with most scripting it is VBScript and works for windows operating system but there are scripts that have been designed for other operating systems and device. These are typically programmed in Perl or Python programming language (5)

Emerging Development in Network Management tools

In this section of the report the emerging network management tools will be mentioned and how they work or are planning to work on. Now that we know of some of the existing network management tools features and what they do the emerging network management tools can be explained.

As we know the world of computing is slowly making a move to the cloud technologies that are in place now and future developing ones but just how are the network management teams in companies going to be able to monitor the resources and data that they contain without the aid of a network management tools and also the factors of the new IPv6 protocols slow transitions and its huge mass of address available to be used but with current technologies and management tools they may support a small amount of the addresses mainly the IPv6 link local addresses but when it come the global scale of things then it is a challenging task. Another emerging possible problem is the factor of those new servers is able to host a virtual workstations or another server on one set of hardware the host operating system is running on.

One of the emerging developments in networking management tools is the change to the 802.3.1 MIB definition for Ethernet. The MIB (Management Information Base) is a virtual data used to manage devices in the network and works with the LLDP (Logical Link Discovery Protocol) and is a used as an extension. The logical Link Discovery protocol is part of the physical layer of the OSI Model. This is used with the SNMP protocols and helps manage these devices. The MIB is definitions based various standards that are mentioned like the SNMP. MIB definitions use method defined in the SMI (Structure of Management Information) Back at March 1991 the MIB had some improvements made so it communication between the devices on the network better this is was because they had refined the database making it easier for hardware vendors to implement it better in their hardware. The change in the MIB coding was made also to improve it reliability and add extra features such as the being able to identify the IP route metrics and information and also obtain the information in a set format defined in the MIB definitions. (6) (7)

In recent developments of the MIB in 2011 the previous version of the MIB wasn’t compatible with the current SNMPv3 protocol because of the additional security features that it has recent been incorporated in the protocol so again changes had to made to the MIB definitions to allow this to happen and keep the network devices an information secure during communication and removes the negative impact on the network performance.

Another part to mention is that the SMI format was changed in 1999 also to cater for more information about the devices/object so the most recent version of this format is SMI v2 it has the changed as said above but also has allowed for the security to be implement to it for example in the SNMP v3 protocol for part of the security mechanisms was a community string and the encryption and decryption of the data received from the object/devices. (8)

SNMP has had a few improvements to date all versions and the differences between the versions will be explained but as we already know on how it work but here a brief explanation. The SNMP protocol allows the NMS (network management System) monitor the devices on the network by fetching statistics from the devices on the networks. SNMP v1 this version was the initial build that define what the SNMP protocols does. In SNMPv2 there was new feature that have been added to the protocol and these were as follows:

Improved performance

Security

Improved confidentiality

Communication with other managers

Better error handling

All these feature had become a necessity as technology advanced and network security wasn’t enough also with the factors of the network management software becoming web based. In SNMP v3 the protocol had been improve again but this time with better security remote configuration enhancements and more. As mention earlier in this document SNMPv3 is able to encrypt the data it carries and the SNMPv3 packet is read-only to the specified receiver also if any of these packets are captured by unauthorized users or hackers they become scrambled. (9)