So what are the best practices.
What should you be doing in a live environment now best practices state that you should use both.
You should use polling based or query based as well as event based network management protocols as part
of your network management solution doesn't help just to receive a large amount of data.
You need to make meaningful decisions on that data.
So you also want to build and leverage alerts and reports so that you both are notified when an issue
occurs whether it was based on a polling based detection mechanism or an event based detection.
And in addition you're going to want some kind of reporting capability which provide you with detail
of performance not only in real time at this point in time but over a period of time.
So you want historical data available so that you can make meaningful decisions.
As an example if an interface on a rota has a utilization of 70 percent.
Is that good or is that a bad that's difficult to know if you don't have historical data that allows
you to build a baseline of what your network typically runs at if that interface in the last three months
has been running at two percent utilization and now suddenly it's running at 90 percent utilization.
You'll know that something has happened on your network that is changed to the interface utilization
dramatically so you're going to want reports to give you performance detail over time as well as notify
you of issues and the availability of devices in your network you're going to want to at a glance be
able to see if there's a problem with a network device such as a router or if there's a problem with
an individual interface on one of your routers.
Don't forget to set the polling frequency and how granular your event notifications are.
This will vary from one environment to another and often depends on the type of topology that you have
the bandwidth available and the resources you have to detect and then act on the information that you're
receiving.
In addition you might need to make decisions on how quickly you need to react to an issue on your network
if something happens on your network and it effects an entire building or the entire organization.
You're going to want to act on that quickly but if something happens and it only affects a single device
that's not important.
It's probably not as important that you get woken up at 3:00 in the morning to tell you that the port
on the switch has gone down.