Understandings Network Management and Network Monitoring

Network management may mean different things to different people. To some network management may be a network consultant monitoring network activity with Network analyzer(Colasoft Capsa Network Analyzer), to others network management may be about distributed database, high-end workstations generating and traffic. Speaking generally, network management is a service, which uses a wide range of devices, tools, and applications, to enable the network managers to monitor and maintain networks successfully & efficiently.

Network management deals with the top-level administration and maintenance of widespread and large networks, commonly seen in the field of computers or telecommunications, which may be necessarily, include user terminal equipment.

Network management executes functions such as security, control, allocation, monitoring, coordination, deployment and planning to name a few. It is also worth noting that network management is governed by a several protocols which are basically present there for its support, including SNMP, Common Information Model, CMIP, WBEM, Transaction Language 1, Java Management Extensions, and Netconf.

Routing is also an important area of network management. Routing refers to the process of selecting the paths in a computer network on which to send data. In this arena of network management, logically addressed packets get transported from their source to their destination with the help of nodes. These nodes are called routers, in a process termed as forwarding.

Successful network management also uses accounting management. This controls and reports on the financial status of the network. This area of network management involves bank account maintenance, financial statement development, and analysis of cash flow and financial health.

Coming to Network Monitoring, it is about policing network traffic. In other words, network monitoring is spying for the benefit of smooth working of network management. Network monitoring is part of network management. Ideally network monitoring is a function that one of your systems must perform on an ongoing basis. While the other systems are performing the functions assigned to them, one should set aside at least one computer to monitor network activity. This is network monitoring in a nutshell.

The computer performing network monitoring must be kept always on. Which means that network monitoring system should have exclusive power lines or, backup generator facility. Everyone should understand that network-monitoring system is the most critical part of any network, because it is with the help of network monitoring that that the alarm will be sent if something is wrong.

Network monitoring will identify the slow or failing systems and notify the network administrator of such lapses. Issues like overloaded systems, crashing of servers, network connections being lost, virus infections, and power outages will be dealt without losing time if network monitoring is in place.

How to Protect Your Network from Spam?

According to the July 2009 edition of the MessageLabs Intelligence Report,Spam remains a major

problem, In fact, it has reached up to 90%, some European countries are higher, up to 95%

Three main problems caused the bad situation.

• The use of automated tools: Spammers are used to use automated tools to
  
  generate email addresses based on domain name.


• URL-shortening spam: Currently, many social networking offers URL-shortening services to
  
  users, 6.2% spamming emails contains shortened URLs to mask unsafe destinations.


• International problem: Unlike we thought the souces of spam emails are outside United
  
  States, According to the static of July, at least, 86% of all e-mails sent in the US are
  
  spam.

Be a network administrator,what can we do to mitigate the effect of spam?

Well, there are two specific network methods you may take.

Traffic management

You'd better to install a network analyzer like Colasoft Capsa network analyzer in your network, that will

help you monitor network traffic especially SMTP traffic we more care

about in this article in real time,Traffic management entails reducing overall message volume by

relying on techniques that are implemented at the protocol level. Essentially,

unwanted senders are identified and their connections dramatically throttled using features that

are inherent to the TCP protocol. This allows incoming volumes of spam to be

slowed, allowing legitimate mail an opportunity to be processed and expedited by the mail

server.

This technique is obviously effective, but it is nevertheless useful to reduce the effect of

a DOS-style of e-mail flooding.

Connection management

Another method would be the use of connection management techniques. An example would be for

incoming SMTP connections from sources known for sending spam and malware to be immediately

rejected. The use of such blacklists can be done at the firewall level and could also include

open proxies or known botnets.

The obvious benefit of connection management is that mail servers do not even have to waste

processor cycles to deal with the incoming spam.

Do you have else methords? let's share our knowledge here!