By Elisabeth Horwitt
Network World, 4/14/97

The Internet/intranet explosion isn't yet taking a heavy toll among survey respondents in terms of net management headaches, but warning signs are in the air.

Respondents to the 1997 Network World Network Management Survey gave their ability to manage Web servers an average importance rating of 3.0 on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being essential. The question was not applicable for 19.5%. Similarly, the ability to manage Web-based applications was rated 2.9 on average and not applicable to 20% of the respondents.

When asked what missing elements were needed for Internet/intranet management, respondents gave a wide range of answers, from automated help to corporate standards. Perhaps the most common answer was management software.

John McConnell, president of McConnell Consulting, Inc., says as intranet installations grow, managers will find themselves dealing with an entirely new set of system and application management challenges and they will need new tools.

A lot of techniques used in the past simply won't apply ''because of the dynamic nature of intranet sites,'' he says. ''For example, when people talk about a baseline in the network and incremental resource usage, this doesn't apply if someone puts in a hot new page and traffic patterns change overnight.''

Intranets also impose highly variable traffic loads, McConnell says. ''When a user clicks on one of those hyperlinks, you have no idea whether what's coming back is 100 bytes or 100M bytes. So how do you maintain performance levels?''

On the content management side, systems managers will need to ''build automated strategies to get the right information in the right place at the right time,'' McConnell says.