Alen Bazant, Vedran Salinovic, Tihomir Babic

Although the network management concept is not new, efficient network management applications have still been developed. In this paper we propose a method for the efficient remote LAN management. In many network management scenarios management application runs on the station that is connected to the managed local network through the public network, e.g. Internet. The problem with the remote network performance monitoring is how to minimize the amount of management data travelling through the Internet. In a classical scenario management station calls management agents in a local network using SNMP protocol and management data are transferred through the Internet all the time. Doing that way the period of data collection must be long enough to lower the amount of management information travelling through the Internet. Therefore we propose the solution in which management application is implemented in the local network being managed. Accordingly, period of management data collection can be decreased and collected data become more significant for the network performance. The management application periodically collects data and generates web pages as a GUI. A remote management station connects to the local management application via Internet and receives web pages depicting network layer throughput and transmission rates per network interfaces.

This is the abstract for the paper. Conference topic: E - Quality of Internet information space.

To clarify the concept, we attach the figure that describes our work. The whole system look’s like MRTG or some other network monitoring tool. MRTG is not a network management system (NMS), it is just s polling machine. Our application (on the figure below it is Administrative Application) can do both, monitor and manage. It uses standard Windows SNMP agent built into the operating system of the personal computer hosting our application. The agent collects data from LAN and stores it into s database. On the basis of the collected data it creates graphs in a form of .gif files that are available to any remote NMS station. So, we have developed our application from scratch. The main difference in comparison with MRTG is that our application allows to remote NMS stations to do monitoring simply by collecting locally prepared graphs, but any remote NMS can manage the network with SNMP Set command. Our Administrative Application can also send Gets and Sets, so it is not only the monitoring tool. So, our paper presents the concept and the product, not a theory.