The Ultimate Guide to Enterprise Network Management

The Network Management Guide explains the challenges of managing enterprise networks, best practices for automating tasks, and how to adopt next-generation artificial intelligence and machine learning.

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Network management is a cornerstone of the IT industry, helping to ensure that enterprises run efficiently from end to end. In recent years, network management and hosting, including resource provisioning, security, and optimization, have become highly automated and have begun to adopt advanced technologies. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can expand the visibility and control of the network and its devices without increasing the burden on IT teams.

In this network management guide, we will delve into functions, technologies, best practices, next-generation emerging technologies, and more, and bring more information to enable people to better understand the important role of network management in the enterprise.

Why is network management important?

To better illustrate the need for a well-designed network management strategy, IT teams should understand the cost of network downtime, which can result in lost revenue, lost employee productivity, damaged reputation, lost investments, and increased operational costs.

A survey by Netrounds, a network monitoring software provider, shows that network outages lead to unexpected and unplanned network quality degradation, resulting in an average loss of about $600,000 for each organization that experiences a network outage. Whether it is expected or unplanned downtime, it will bring losses, and enterprises can avoid or reduce these losses through network management.

Enterprises want an easier approach to network management because comprehensive visibility and monitoring require a large number of skilled staff. Network automation reduces this burden by eliminating common labor-intensive manual network tasks such as provisioning, scripting, implementing change requests, and identifying the causes of delays and outages.

Automation also brings the following benefits:

• Reduce human error;
• Rapidly deliver new services;
• Ability to locate and identify the root causes of network security issues;
• Reduced security risks because fewer manual processes mean fewer configuration or policy errors that could create vulnerabilities.

Network automation is just one of many concepts and terms that are important as people gain a deeper understanding of network management.

Network management functions

Network management consists of five elements: fault management, configuration management, account management, performance management, and security management (also known as FCAPS). Network management expert Amy Larsen DeCarlo details these elements and explains their importance in managing enterprise operations.

To account for the role these elements play, network professionals use monitoring tools to monitor the network end-to-end. These tools provide visibility into performance, traffic, usage, failures, and availability. As expert Ed Tittel and IT writer Kim Landros explain, "Careful network monitoring can facilitate proactive strategies, such as justifying the cost of hardware or infrastructure upgrades needed to eliminate long-term network bottlenecks."

Although network monitoring is available as network device logs, open source tools, or proprietary monitoring capabilities built into network products, it is often more powerful as a fully dedicated platform with a rich feature set and vendor support.

In addition to network monitoring, organizations should carefully consider implementing network analytics tools to compile the data collected through monitoring and generate insightful and actionable reports. Network analytics and network monitoring tools should be able to span on-premises, cloud, or hybrid deployment environments and uniformly configure wired and wireless infrastructure.

Conducting a network assessment to account for the various network components that can collect and analyze telemetry data is critical to choosing the tools that will work best for your organization. For example, some platforms place a heavy emphasis on monitoring and reporting, offering some out-of-the-box analytics capabilities, while others focus on deep root cause analysis and AI customization. Also, make sure your IoT environment, if any, is included in your assessment.

Best Practices for Managing Your Network

Inventory network assets. Enterprises need to accurately inventory all devices and applications on the network. Use tools that can automatically discover devices to reduce the difficulty and tediousness of IT staff to complete this task.

Reduce manual management. Automating network management is considered a best practice, but the concept is too general to be automated at scale. Automation should be kept simple, low-risk, and quick to start. For example, network teams can automate device locators to find out where devices are connected to the network, perform application connectivity checks, verify that each network infrastructure device is properly connected, and find differences between network configuration sections and the enterprise's configuration templates. As teams gain success with this configuration, they can move toward automation of intermediate and advanced tasks, such as verifying border gateway protocol connections and automating access control list updates.

Assess the scope and risk of changes. Even the network change management process is driven by best practices that can reduce the risk of failed changes. Applying some basic operating principles, such as assessing the scope of proposed changes, will prevent possible mistakes.

These questions include:

• What is the number of endpoints affected by the change?
• How important is the service that the change might affect?

The assessment of scope should be accompanied by a risk analysis. Afterwards, the network team should work the changes through peer review, pre-deployment testing and validation, implementation and testing, and documentation and network management updates.

Make processes, including troubleshooting, repeatable through documentation. Documentation is extremely helpful in most areas of network management, but especially when trying to troubleshoot wired network and wireless connectivity issues. For example, how IT identifies and resolves wireless network connectivity issues should be documented and reused to save time and avoid configuration errors.

TechTarget executive Lisa Phifer offers 10 steps to troubleshoot wireless network connectivity issues that walk people through everything from basic problems, such as making sure the correct Wi-Fi access point is selected, to more advanced client issues.

Network Management Challenges

Even with best practices in place, network management can present challenges for organizations.

• Legacy network tools. Managing dispersed environments, including virtual and cloud-based networks, can become difficult if an enterprise relies on legacy, cumbersome monitoring tools. Legacy monitoring tools can also hinder efforts to gain end-to-end visibility.
• Complexity and abstraction. There are also challenges with adopting modern technologies because they add complexity to the network environment. For example, in virtualized environments, traditional network monitoring tools are forced to interact with the hypervisor. Hypervisors force a split between appliance-based network components, virtual routers, switches, and firewalls, and can complicate end-to-end visibility. Overlay networks have similar issues because they can hide the underlying hardware and software from monitoring tools.
• Interconnectivity. Despite the interest in multi-cloud environments, the bridges that connect the environments create configuration headaches, inconsistent performance, and security concerns that network professionals have to address. They make it difficult to apply sound network management principles.

Network management tools

Network management vendors want to reduce the complexity of their products and improve their interoperability and feature sets. Even so, most enterprises still use multiple network management tools for various products and devices, which only adds to the complexity. Here are some examples of progress made in network management interoperability.

Integrated network monitoring and security

Integrate network management and monitoring with security tools to provide more comprehensive security insights, bringing more value to the enterprise. With this capability, network administrators can play a greater role in addressing security risks and share important information with security teams.

Integrated network management security will also be beneficial when it comes to the labor-intensive task of performing security audits. IT teams can automatically validate configurations and standards across devices and deliver results more efficiently.

As-a-Service Network Monitoring

Vendors are also working on how to help network teams monitor the performance of cloud computing environments, especially SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. In terms of SaaS monitoring, network teams must find a tool that allows them to monitor the end user's path from global Internet service providers to the public cloud to measure service latency, DNS speed and accessibility, and content delivery network responsiveness from the end user's perspective.

Learn how network performance monitoring tools have evolved to address as-a-service network monitoring environments.

Hybrid Cloud Monitoring

Cloud computing providers typically only help enterprises monitor within their own environments, but emerging network monitoring tools are emerging to meet the needs of multi-cloud monitoring. Hybrid cloud monitoring platforms use passive network devices to capture traffic data across the hybrid cloud environment. With analytical capabilities, they can identify potential outages before they cause serious problems.

Open Source Network Monitoring

Open source network monitoring is an attractive and cost-effective option for enterprises with tight budgets but still under pressure to meet service level agreement requirements. Skilled developers in the industry have collaborated on these products, which have been rigorously reviewed by peers and users.

Open source tools can also help companies avoid the increased licensing costs that come with adding more components that need to be monitored. Using open source technology, companies can expand the environment they need to manage, including servers and switches, without breaking the budget for licensing and support contracts.

Configuration Management

Configuration management improves network maintenance and helps track connected devices, device configurations, and device connections. With configuration management, network teams can achieve three goals: maintain accurate configuration records, enable effective network scanning, and enable network automation capabilities.

Automated network testing

Automated network testing can complement network management tools, verifying physical connectivity, routing protocol functionality, path performance, etc. However, the same network management issues around abstraction, virtualization, and overlays apply to automated network testing as well.

There are three types of network automation tools:

• Tools built primarily for server and application automation but have expanded to include networking;
• Tools designed specifically for the web;
• Software-defined platform that creates a software overlay across LAN hardware.

All of these tools offer features and capabilities that eliminate error-prone manual tasks such as configuration backup, tool access control, compliance monitoring and verification, vulnerability assessment, and network orchestration. Enterprises can explore leading network automation tools.

Network professionals can look to create end-to-end services by incorporating network automation tools to aid in design, implementation, and testing.

Next Generation Network Monitoring Technology

Intent-based networking is one of the most promising technologies for network management. Intent-based networking uses automation and orchestration to change the way network configurations are deployed. The goal is for enterprises to build self-managing, self-healing networks that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform network tasks.

Admittedly, IT teams are wary of this level of automation, fearing it will take them away from day-to-day operations. When companies hire network professionals, they should ensure that candidates are willing to hand over some control to emerging automation and intelligent tools to better automate operations in the enterprise.

On the security side, AI and machine learning will help network teams identify dangerous activity by recognizing disruptive traffic patterns that differ from normal activity. This becomes especially important in IoT environments.

AI and machine learning will also improve network operations, enabling analytics applications to discover the root cause of problems and automatically implement the correct fixes.

One of the biggest benefits of AI and machine learning is the potential to significantly reduce the number of events that workers must handle each day, potentially from millions to just a handful of critical events.

Network management techniques are also evolving rapidly as emerging technologies are introduced and enable IT teams to become more strategic in how they manage next-generation networks.