When you deploy a network management system it's typically going to add an overhead to your network.
This is especially true if you're using a query based system that's polling the network using a very
short interval.
So you should determine the scope and impact on the network that the network management system will
have so as mentioned one of the things you need to think about is polling frequency.
This means how often you're going to pull devices to collect data.
The more often that you polled devices the more granular and the more detailed your statistics are going
to be.
However on the flip side that means that it's going to have a larger impact on your network because
there's more traffic being transmitted on the network.
The network management system is polling the network on a more frequent basis which puts more traffic
on the network.
And in addition there's a higher load on your network devices because they have to reply back to the
network management station with information that you're trying to gather from that network device.
So more polling equates to more detail and quicker detection of issues but it puts a higher load on
both the network and the devices in your network.
Now once again the advantage of more polling is that you have more detail and it's quicker to detect
issues.
However on the flip side it can create extra traffic on the network now most modern network management
systems and a lot of modern network devices can handle a larger amount of network management traffic
than was possible in the past.
The processing power of your network devices and the speed of interfaces are a lot greater today than
they were a few years ago so it's not as much of a problem as it may have once been this is another
reason that you want to leverage both event based network management protocols as well as query based
network management protocols event based protocols once again offer real time unsolicited feedback from
your network devices.
A road is going to inform the network management station when an interface goes down with polling based
or query based protocols.
There's a query and response in other words the mess is querying a device for information and it's responding
or answering back to that query now less polling equates to less bandwidth utilization.
But in addition equates to smaller storage requirements which is another important thing to think about.
If you're collecting a large amount of data you need to think about your disk requirements for your
sequel server which is where NPM stores data large amounts of data equate to bigger scale databases
which in turn means that you need more disk space.