An architecture for monitoring and modeling network systems

Advances in network monitoring protocols, such as SNMP and RMON, combined with their widespread availability from commercial vendors, has led to the development of tools that enable system administrators to effectively manage problem domains, such as network configuration and troubleshooting. The abundance of monitoring and data-gathering tools presents an opportunity to combine network monitoring and modeling technologies to provide enhanced network management capabilities. For example, a network administrator can monitor his existing internetwork and use this information as a basis for capacity-planning projections. Alternative configurations can be compared using "live" network data to characterize the trafic streams, which is superior to using "back-of-the-envelope" estimates.This paper1 presents an architecture for monitoring and modeling, using commonly available tools. Our proposed architecture uses resources available to the network manager and does not require the use of any commercially available tools. Additionally, we show how network capacity planning, configuration, and sharing of network performance statistics among network administrative domains can be improved by the use of our architecture.