Subject: Telecom Network Management

Topic: Broadband Network Management

Difficulty: Medium

Ans:

1. Remote Monitoring Version 1 (RMONv1, or RMON) is defined in RFC 2819; an enhanced version of the standard, called RMON Version 2 (RMONv2), is defined in RFC 2021.

2. RMONv1 provides the NMS with packet-level statistics about an entire LAN or WAN. RMONv2 builds on RMONv1 by providing network- and application-level statistics.

3. Remote Network Monitoring (RMON ) was developed to help us understand how the network itself is functioning, as well as how individual devices on the network are affecting the network as a whole. It can be used to monitor not only LAN traffic, but WAN interfaces as well.

4. RMON reduces the necessity of agents in the network to be visible at all times to the NMS. One of the NMSs would frequently indicate that one of the hubs would show failure, but the hub recovered itself without any intervention.

5. The performance study of the hub that the LAN was part of indicated that the LAN would frequently become overloaded with heavy traffic, and would have a significant packet loss. That included the ICMP packets that the NMS was using to poll the hub. The NMS was set to indicate a node failure if three successive ICMP packets did not receive responses. Increasing the number of packets needed to indicate a failure stopped the failure indication. This demonstrates the third advantage. There are more chances that the monitoring packets, such as ICMP pings, may get lost in long distance communication, especially under heavy traffic conditions. This may wrongly be interpreted by the NMS as the managed object being down.

6. RMON pings locally and hence has less chance of losing packets, thus increasing the reliability of monitoring.

7. Another advantage of local monitoring using RMON is that individual segments can be monitored on a more continuous basis. This provides better statistics and greater ability for control. Thus, a fault could be diagnosed quicker by the RMON and reported to the NMS.

8. In some situations, a failure could even be prevented by proactive management. The overall benefits of implementing RMON technology in a network are higher network availability for users and greater productivity for administrators.

• Remote network monitoring is also known as RMON

• RMON was developed to help network administrators monitor and analyze data that is collected from local area networks.

• Remote network monitoring is a part of a MIB or management information base. It is an added feature to the SNMP. In addition, it can be supported through different types of software.

• There are six kinds of information that remote network monitoring programs can collect

i) Packets sent

ii) Bytes sent

iii) Statistics of the host

iv) Packets that have been dropped

v) Conversations that have been held between two different addresses

vi) Different events

• A network administrator has the power to find out how much bandwidth is being used by certain users of the network. In addition, the administrator can find out what websites are being visited by the users.

• Remote Network Monitoring (RMON ) was developed to help us understand how the network itself is functioning, as well as how individual devices on the network are affecting the network as a whole. It can be used to monitor not only LAN traffic, but WAN interfaces as well.

• RMONv1 provides the NMS with packet-level statistics about an entire LAN or WAN. RMONv2 builds on RMONv1 by providing network- and application-level statistics.

• RMON pings locally and hence has less chance of losing packets, thus increasing the reliability of monitoring.

• Another advantage of local monitoring using RMON is that individual segments can be monitored on a more continuous basis. This provides better statistics and greater ability for control. Thus, a fault could be diagnosed quicker by the RMON and reported to the NMS.

• In some situations, a failure could even be prevented by proactive management. The overall benefits of implementing RMON technology in a network are higher network availability for users and greater productivity for administrators.

• Remote network monitoring can allow you to remain at your current workstation while simultaneously performing the necessary troubleshooting requirements

• This program allows you to diagnose problems faster than ever before. In addition, the continuous monitoring gives you time to work on other problems and still maintain your coverage.