* Areas of network management that are shining
In the many columns written here about network and systems management – by me and other Enterprise Management Associates analysts – topics have ranged from individual companies and products, to specific areas such as business service management, to standards and best practices such as those in the IT Infrastructure Library – but almost nothing about “network management,” itself.
One reason for this is that the term is so general. Another reason, though, is that “network management” no longer reflects anything nearly as coherent and well defined as it did, say, five or certainly 10 years ago. Rather, network management has become a dumping ground for a collection of sub-markets, many of which go beyond traditional concepts of managing network devices with enabling technologies that span other disciplines across the wider infrastructure.
Anyway, this week and next week, I thought I’d try to remedy this omission with a brief, two-part and still admittedly USA Today-like summary of how I see network management shaping up – in terms of hot spots or areas of energy within the industry. (This is far from being a complete or pure taxonomy for market sizing. Defining pure taxonomies and capturing areas of growth in enterprise management are often conflicting directions.)
* Event management, analytics and root-cause analysis. Without meaning to sound unoriginal, truly dynamic and effective fault isolation across networked infrastructure is still far from being old hat. Current innovations focus on ease of deployment, adaptability, better alignment to business services and higher levels of automation throughout.
* Integrated fault and performance management. This has been an area of attention for the last several years and will continue to be an industry growth point, as troubleshooting across the infrastructure often requires effective real-time and historical insights into both availability-driven events and performance statistics.
* Application flow management. EMA is wrapping up a report on NetFlow adoption as a companion piece to a broader report on application flow management. This is a hot and sprawling market defined chiefly by management directed at application flows (IP and UDP) across a network. EMA includes a wide range of technologies in this area, including packet analysis and route analytics (described below), as well as packet shaping technologies, some security technologies and of course more classical application flow sources such as NetFlow and RMON. The industry is gradually becoming aware that taking a “bloodstream” approach to application service management can provide an effective first point of automation for troubleshooting upwards into the application and downwards into the networked infrastructure. Many application-flow-oriented products provide valuable insights into service usage that can become primary resources for service and capacity planning, chargeback (we’ll look at this more closely next week), security (unusual application volumes may signal unwanted intrusions or undesired user behavior in accessing unauthorized and possibly unsafe applications), and troubleshooting where insight into consumption patterns may yield the answer to a performance problem.
* Route analytics. While a subset of application flow management, route analytics deserves its own space, as it is its own very distinctive technology. Route analytics products passively “listen” to real-time IP flows much as if they were participants in the routed network, with real-time insights into current and hence transient routed traffic patterns across the network. They can at once help to isolate Layer 3-specific problems, such as interface flapping, and can be useful in automating problem resolution by geographically isolating real service issues in real time.
Next week we’ll look at a few more areas, such as chargeback and anomaly detection, network change and configuration management, the business and asset side of network management, and newer technologies such as VoIP, wireless and MPLS VPNs.
