Hierarchical Network Management

Proceedings JENC6 M. R. Siegl HIERARCHICAL NETWORK MANAGEMENT A Concept and its Prototype in SNMPv2 Manfred R. Siegl Georg Trausmuth Abstract The increasing size of networks makes their management more and more di cult. While large networks are already structured hierarchically in two or three layers, network management has not yet moved from at to hierarchical structures. The resulting problems are discussed in this article. In search for solutions, the deployment of midlevel management tools seems to be a way out of the crisis. By reducing the number of management values with rather low information content and calculating high order values, micromanagement tries to reduce the ood of information. This paper presents our solution, namely a prototype SubManager, which is a mid-level tool used to stucture network management hierarchically. Some examples are given to demonstrate its use. Our approach has the following advantages: 1) Interfaces to both managers and agents conform to SNMPv1 and SNMPv2. 2) The SubManager can easily be integrated into existing network management systems. 3) Compared with other systems already available, our approach is dynamically con gurable; this means that new management procedures can be downloaded from a manager at runtime. The result of a network management procedure is higher level information which can be used by the management station.