Building the management intranet

By JAMES HERMAN
Network World, 05/24/99

Got your corporate intranet done yet? Good: Now it's time to get started on your management intranet.

The same benefits that have users scurrying to build corporate intranets and extranets now have some leading-edge organizations building intranets dedicated to network management.

The management intranet will first be used as a vehicle to make information easily available to any authorized operators or technicians, regardless of what desktop operating system they use. This universal client approach will promote ease of use and reduce training time - because everyone knows how to use a Web browser - while offering remote access to management tools over WANs and LANs. At the same time, Web standards such as HTML and Extensible Markup Language (XML) can be used to link your different management systems in a practical and easily extendible manner.

Diagram of how it works

These technologies will also provide the opportunity to securely extend access to management information beyond the boundaries of the enterprise, creating the equivalent of an extranet. This management extranet will include links to vendor and service provider Web sites as well as controlled interactions with the management intranets of key partners.

Over the next few years, IT departments will further extend their use of Web technology to enhance how they communicate with their end users and internal customers. The management intranet must be integrated with the enterprise intranet, giving end users access to application and network health-status information. Additionally, the integration will allow the streamlining of support-service delivery through Web-based submission of such things as requests for moves, adds and changes. An initial focus on standardization and universal access will give way to more significant investment in automation and integration of management systems.

The way forward, however, begins with relatively inexpensive and easy-to-implement first steps. The following is intended to show you the way.

Get started. Appoint a Webmaster to work at least part-time on Webifying your current in-house databases, custom applications and purchased management tools, and to set up the basic Web server foundations for your management intranet. Extend your capabilities by training existing management-tool support personnel in Web technologies and Web-based development. A manager or technical contributor also has to be put in charge of the management intranet and its development. This includes responsibility for security policies as well as technical decision making.

Set strategy and standards. Make decisions early regarding platforms, tools, hosting and other implementation issues, to avoid creating an incompatible mess.

One fundamental decision to make is whether to use internal staff to implement and maintain your management intranet or turn instead to outside service providers. There is an increasingly diverse set of providers available, ranging from traditional systems integrators that will build it for you to providers that can make a customizable Web environment available almost instantly using secure sessions to their hosting services.

Until this new generation of management systems matures, however, most enterprises will probably want to employ at least some in-house resources to extend and improve the content and structure of their management intranets and extranets. If your company is heavily involved in electronic commerce or value chain integration over the Internet, significant policy and technical decisions will come up concerning the management of interorganizational information systems, making in-house expertise important.

Using common tools and platforms across the organization is not essential but will help reduce costs for training and support. In choosing these management intranet enablers, it is important to achieve the right balance between sophistication and the time required to learn the tools. A simple approach that doesn't require a lot of upfront training or hiring of specialized resources is best, at least at first.

Content standards are required. Existing documentation standards can be extended relatively easily to cover Web-based publishing of procedures, configuration data, knowledge bases and so on. If such standards don't exist, this is a great time to put some in place, as the major migration to the Web takes place. Don't get carried away, however. One of the reasons the Web works so well is that it relies on a relatively small set of interface standards that promote innovation rather than constrain it.

Set up a security architecture. Enable remote, secure access to the management intranet for support staff and managers using Secure Sockets Layer and/or HTTPS and virtual private network connections. Consider how many levels of management information access you'll need in your environment and organize your Web servers to support each level. Begin to explore models for secure interaction with management systems in other enterprises that your organization does business with. Managing systems that are shared among enterprises in the same value chain is a major challenge being brought on by the era of Web commerce. As with any extranet, you'll need to come up with policies regarding what management information you want other organizations to be able to see, and set up security measures that make only that information available to your partners.

Manage via the browser. Most enterprise-level management systems already support browser access to most functions. Start using the browser interfaces you already have and consider selectively upgrading other core management systems to versions that support browser access. Going forward, almost all new management tools will be designed to be used primarily via a browser. In future purchases, favor tools that can be used entirely via a browser. Consider migrating from existing telnet-based or SNMP-only device management to direct browser access to the device's built-in configuration and trouble-shooting features. This is something being offered by most network device makers, including Cisco, 3Com and Nortel Networks, in their newest products. As your network devices turn over and are upgraded, the new models will all come with embedded Web servers and a fairly complete element manager packaged inside.

Stitch it together. The next step is to begin extending and integrating the management intranet. Take your most important home-grown databases of configuration, user and supplier data, as well as any knowledge bases or regularly generated reports, and make them accessible via the management intranet. Use HTML to integrate reports from different sources and to make them more readily accessible. Create navigation pages and indexes of these information resources. Make it easy for different technical-support people to customize the pages and indexes to their own needs. For example, provide a master page that support people can customize to their liking. Or go a step further and build different templates for each support group, complete with links to appropriate sites. Similarly, create home pages for different regions, sites or parts of the organization. Make sure you exploit the simple utility of a search engine, which will work well within the limited domain of an enterprise management intranet and make it easier to find information.

Management tool vendors such as Cisco and Tivoli already are using hyperlinks and XML exchange to improve the way management tools work together. For frequently used tools and major enterprisewide systems, you can begin to improve navigation by creating custom hyperlinks, which will reduce the number of clicks it takes to move among primary pages. Also, you can begin to tie different kinds of resources together with scripts that, for example, automatically populate forms with information from databases.

In 18 months or less, Common Information Model (CIM) interfaces will be widely implemented on most management tools. At first, the main effect of CIM, which is part of the Web-Based Enterprise Manage-ment (WBEM) initiative, will be to harmonize the naming of managed objects across different tools. The tools will then be able to more easily use data from other tools to provide a complete picture of the environment. It will also be easier to pull summary data out of multiple tools via the CIM interface and publish them via the Web.

Adopting a browser-based approach to management tool and database access should offer a number of benefits. Remote access via the Internet will be a welcome change for level three gurus, the most senior personnel who get called in to the operations center late at night to fix problems. Distribution and updating of management tools is easier when there are no client-side components to worry about. With browser and Web protocols such as HTML and XML being used as integration points rather than management platforms, management tools can be easily spread out across multiple servers, instead of having to coexist with a central management platform on one server. External providers can actually supply some tools entirely as services. Companies such as NetOps and Candle are pioneering this application service provider approach to network management.

Extend out. The real benefits of Web-based management are realized when you begin to link external resources to your management intranet, creating a management extranet. Navigation pages for each segment of your support team can be populated with links to just the right set of vendor-support Web sites that fit the technologies each segment deals with. Press your service providers to publish monthly service-level reports in HTML. You can try out Web-based customer network management interfaces for your key frame relay and managed network services.

A big step up in applying Web technologies is to create new interfaces for communicating with your customers - meaning end users. You can make a portion of the management intranet visible to users through your enterprise intranet. The help desk can offer Web-based submission of problems and change requests. It can also publish "live" summary data of network performance and resource availability. Web-based publishing of service-level reports, chargeback analysis and project status will improve your relationships with your internal clients. You can also deliver tools that enable users to help solve their own problems. Such self-help facilities range from simple FAQ files and password reset capabilities to pull models for software updates.

Automate administrative functions. The Web is much more than just a publishing medium. It is now a platform for the creation and delivery of Web-based services. Ultimately, as businesses adopt e-business practices, so will IT departments. This means moving business processes to Web-based information sharing and linkage with customers and suppliers. In a similar fashion, enterprise IT departments can significantly streamline their work processes by moving away from paper and toward Web-based direct entry of requests and orders. IT departments should also be leaders in adopting electronic commerce approaches to purchasing. They should use Web-based interfaces to configure and order new hardware, software and services.

Evaluate major new investments. Almost all management software vendors are quickly incorporating Web technologies into their products. One of the beauties of adopting management intranet architecture is that it does not require you to drop any of your existing systems.

The use of Web-based management, however, does give you new options. It makes it easier to integrate best-of-breed products with each other or with a major enterprise framework. There are new Web-from-the-start companies in the market that should be looked at. Entirely new management systems will be needed to handle the scale, complexity and demanding service levels of electronic commerce and e-business.

It may be a bit early to make major commitments to new products that will play a key role in your enterprise management strategy. But, as with all things having to do with the Web, new approaches will evolve rapidly and begin to mature sooner than we expect. Once we're done with Y2K, it will be a good time to re-evaluate options and determine the best enterprise management strategy for the Web-based management era.

Building the management intranet

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