Network Management Tutorial

When: Monday, 27 August 2012
Time: 09:00 - 12:30 (UTC +7)
Where: Auditorium
Instructor(s): Hervey Allen and Phil Regnauld (NSRC)

In this tutorial we will cover the core concepts of what it means to monitor and manage a network. The concepts presented apply to networks of any size. These include:

What we monitor:

  • Systems and services
  • Resources
  • Network performance
  • Changes and configurations

Why we do this:

  • Upgrades
  • Audits
  • History
  • Accounting
  • Problem detection (attacks, hardware failures, capacity limits)
  • Trends

What we keep track of:

  • Network statistics
  • Faults (intrusion detection)
  • Use of ticketing systems
  • Baselining
  • Load
  • Jitter
  • Usage
  • Noise

We will demonstrate tools that help document availability, performance, and reliability. In addition we will cover some practical router configuration specifics for proper and secure access, to enable network flows (NetFlow), to export logging messages to a central logging server, and to allow for the backup of router configurations using tools such as RANCID. Each of the client tools will be demonstrated as well, for example (in alphabetical order):

  • Nagios
  • Netdot
  • RANCID
  • w/ Graylog2
  • WebSVN

What we'll actually attempt to demonstrate are:

  • SNMP
  • Cacti
  • Logging (router configuration and logging server)
  • Nagios
  • RANCID / WebSVN (router configuration and sample backups)
  • SMokePing
  • NetFlow (router configuration and collector)
  • NfSen
  • Netdot

At the end of the tutorial, attendees should have an idea of what it takes to monitor and manage a network and an understanding of the tools available in the Open Source world that run under Linux and UNIX. Note that these are used to monitor Windows clients and servers just as effectively as Linux and UNIX machines.