Network management: Who's really in control?

I’d like to first say hello to everyone reading our new network management columns. This is a first for me and I welcome feedback and commentary from anyone and everyone in response to my musings here. I hope to hit on key topics that are regularly discussed in our business and provide a broader discussion of those topics for more public consumption. We hope to have these columns coming your way on a weekly basis from here on out.

To start off I’d like to pick things up from where my colleague, Dennis Drogseth, left off with his last column, talking about trends in the network management landscape. Only this week, I’d like to further explore how network management no longer lives in a corporate vacuum and has to cohabitate with a myriad of other organizational groups and departments - departments the network team never before had to contend with or consult with in the course of accomplishing its daily duties.

In the golden days of network management, let’s say pre-2000, the network team handled everything and anything that touched the network backbone of the organization. Whether it was tracked in the form of packets, sessions, transactions, protocols, or by ports it was the sole purview of the network team. Of course there was a prevailing attitude that if anything went wrong or didn’t work on the corporate IT front, then it was the network’s fault. It didn’t matter whether it was a server-side issue or an errant application. It was always the network’s fault.

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I’d like to first say hello to everyone reading our new network management columns. This is a first for me and I welcome feedback and commentary from anyone and everyone in response to my musings here. I hope to hit on key topics that are regularly discussed in our business and provide a broader discussion of those topics for more public consumption. We hope to have these columns coming your way on a weekly basis from here on out.

To start off I’d like to pick things up from where my colleague, Dennis Drogseth, left off with his last column, talking about trends in the network management landscape. Only this week, I’d like to further explore how network management no longer lives in a corporate vacuum and has to cohabitate with a myriad of other organizational groups and departments - departments the network team never before had to contend with or consult with in the course of accomplishing its daily duties.

In the golden days of network management, let’s say pre-2000, the network team handled everything and anything that touched the network backbone of the organization. Whether it was tracked in the form of packets, sessions, transactions, protocols, or by ports it was the sole purview of the network team. Of course there was a prevailing attitude that if anything went wrong or didn’t work on the corporate IT front, then it was the network’s fault. It didn’t matter whether it was a server-side issue or an errant application. It was always the network’s fault.

Assuming the source of the problem was really focused in the server or application areas, members from those portions of the organization would have to get any network-related information directly from the network team via formal request. They would typically submit their request, the network team would review their request, and if their request was deemed worthy, the information was sent over to the requesting team in its most raw or basic form. The recipients would just have to deal with what they were provided and use that information to try and isolate the source of the problem, identify the most appropriate corrective course of action, and then institute a fix, all with minimal information to go on.

Now, let’s fast-forward to the present day. Requests for data, support, cooperation, etc., from the network team aren’t just coming from their traditional IT counterparts - they're originating from across the entire enterprise. Those requests are coming from groups and departments like quality, procurement, legal, test, audit, compliance, senior management, database, the data center, and within the NOC itself. Imagine the network team trying to field requests from all those diverse groups back in the golden days of network supremacy. They would have been doing nothing but responding to all those requests all day long.

Fortunately, times have changed, at least in some respects, for the better. Today we have newer network management tools, platforms and utilities that allow team members, from across the enterprise, to directly access these extensive resources for their own specific needs and uses. Many of these tools are capable of controlling and securing user access so that the end user is constrained to the product features and portions of network data they would typically need on a routine basis. With these tools, corporate teams and departments outside of the network group no longer have to beg and plead for access to available information when attempting to diagnose problems in their piece of the corporate IT world. And in many instances, resolving today’s network-related problems is no further away than a login and quick examination of where the network management tools say the source of the root cause is located.