Network Management: Accounting & Performance Strategies

Title:              Network Management: Accounting & Performance Strategies
Authors:        Benoit Claise, Ralf Wolter
ISBN-10(13):  1587051982
Publisher:      Cisco Press
Published:     June 30, 2007
Edition:         1st Edition
Language:     English

Network Management is crucial in the successful operation of a network. Over the years Network Management has changed dramatically. Early Management systems were nothing more than a process of pinging an IP address, when you missed a ping there could be something wrong! Now we want to know what is wrong and preferable be warned before something goes wrong. And wouldn't it be nice or even required to see who or what is eating up our bandwidth or to have proof that we get the bandwidth we pay for? All these requirements have led to many protocols and standards over the years. Here is a book that organizes all this, brilliantly.

The book is organized in three sections that I would describe as follows: Part I, The theory, Part II, The tools, Part III, How we can use these tools in different scenarios.

Part I has three chapters and counts for almost a third of the book. The information contained in these three chapters alone make buying the book worthwhile. Part I is vendor neutral and would be excellent reading for network managers to quickly acquire a detailed overview of standards and technologies. Chapter 1 describes the need for Accounting and Performance Management. Chapter 2 (Data Collection Methodology) describes the data you need to collect and the detail required, as well as how to collect the data and be sure of its integrity. This is the longest chapter in the book and one of my favorites. Chapter 3 deals with standards and definitions. This is the chapter with the most abbreviations J

Part II outlines the most common network management tools available on Cisco IOS devices and how to implement them. Here we find SNMP, RMON, IP Accounting, NetFlow, BGP Policy Accounting, AAA Accounting, NBAR, IP SLA. Each implementation has its own chapter and follows the same procedure: first an explanation of the feature and then how to configure it. Configuration takes up most of the chapter and is very detailed with examples and many show commands. I found this very useful. Chapter 12 (the last chapter in Part II) connects everything in tables - these tables have already proven very useful for me.

Part III (Assigning Technologies to Solutions) applies the tools from Part II to some real world scenarios like: Monitoring, Capacity Planning, Voice, Security and Billing scenarios. In each chapter the tools are identified that will help to achieve the goal.

Both authors are Cisco engineers specializing in accounting, performance and fault management and it shows! They really know their stuff!

In short, this is a very useful book; you learn and you apply what you have learned. What else could you wish for?