19 Apr 12:30 Ismo Kangas: Network Monitoring System: Architecture And Use In a Company

Master thesis defence by Ismo Kangas 19.4 at 12:30 on Spektri, 3rd floor

Network Monitoring System: Architecture And Use In a Company

Abstract:

Computer networks have become a crucial part of the services used in everyday life such as banking and healthcare. Even though the networking is critical to these services, it gets sometimes dismissed and forgotten. This can lead to a situation that a failure or malfunction in a networking device brings down a whole service or degrades the usability at least. That is why there is a need for an effective mechanism to repair any network related issues.

The first step towards repairing an issue is to notice it, preferably before any end-user does. That calls for an automated monitoring system which constantly polls the network devices. Unfortunately it is not enough to just notice the problem. Someone needs to take action to move towards solution.

Before any services and processes can be discussed, the reader should have basic understanding about monitoring systems. This work provides knowledge to cover that aspect in form of discussion about the required properties of a network monitoring system, the protocols commonly used and the general structure of the system. After the technical aspects are clear, the work moves on to presenting the harder part of the whole which is the people who actually maintain and manage the network.

For the solution to the problem in the network to be effective, the personnel needs to have a clear vision on how to proceed in the case of network failure. This is addressed by presenting an example service that could be provided with a network monitoring system and processes to support that service. These processes make sure that the service is delivered consistently regardless of who does the actual work.

To ensure that the presented processes are easily adoptable to existing organizations, an example organization is presented. The example organization consists of groups that have well defined functions. Additionally the organization and the processes follow the ideology of process framework Information Technology Infrastructure Library to provide further ease of implementation to existing organizations.

All in all, this work sets out to provide a fundamental guide to network monitoring from the technical aspects of monitoring to the people and the processes. The whole work provides information on what is a NMS, what can be done with it and how the service is delivered in an efficient way.