Another important topic to discuss is the impact of the network topology on your network monitoring.
If an interface goes down does it impact the ability of the enemies to collect data from your network
devices so as an example if you viewed the network topology in something as simple as Visio or within
one of your management tools.
How would an outage affect the ability of your network management system to collect data from devices
in your network.
If you had devices at a remote site and you wanted to collect statistics from those devices how will
a link down affect your ability to get to those statistics.
If there was only a single link to the remote site and you had a central network management system and
the link went down the enemies would no longer be able to access those devices to collect data you may
need to deploy a network management collector on the remote site to collect data remotely rather than
trying to collect everything from a central site so this would mean as an example that you deploy a
distributed network management architecture rather than having a single centralized network management
system.
This is especially true where you have multiple data centers.
In that case you might want to deploy multiple copies of NPM one in each data center that then forwards
data to an enterprise operation console or EOC.
So remember if you can't get to it you can't monitor it so it's important that you keep track of your
network topology because you need to ensure that you have reach ability status when the topology changes.