Open Network Administrator (ONA) - A Web-based Network Management Tool

This paper presents Open Network Administrator (ONA), a web-based network management tool. Network administrators interact with ONA over the web, and ONA interacts with routers, switches and access points, using telnet and/or SNMP. ONA provides a common web interface to a number of different vendors’ network products, and provides granular access control, permitting network administrators across multiple departments to manage a network in a consistent manner. In addition to typical day-to-day operations like changing switch port speed, duplex, VLAN, etc., ONA performs a number of other maintenance operations, such as automatically backing up switch configurations, maintaining traffic graphs, and sending device reboot/up/down alerts via e-mail. ONA leverages some existing components, such as RRDtool [1] and CVSweb [2]. A summary of existing tools, both commercial and open source, is provided, with comparisons made to ONA. At the University of Waterloo, where there is both a central IT group and many sizeable decentralized autonomous IT groups, ONA rapidly gained widespread enthusiastic acceptance.