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So what are the best practices, what should you be doing in a live environment? Now

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best practices state that you should use both.

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You should use polling-based or query-based as well as event-based network management protocols as part

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of your network management solution.

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Now, it doesn't help just to receive a large amount of data, you need to make meaningful decisions

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on that data.

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So you'll also want to build and leverage alerts and reports so that you're both notified when an issue occurs,

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whether it was based on a polling-based detection mechanism or an event-based detection.

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And in addition, you're going to want some kind of reporting capability that provides you with detail

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of performance, not only in real-time at this point in time, but over a period of time.

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So you want historical data available so that you can make meaningful decisions.

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As an example, if an interface on a router has a utilization of 70% is that good or is that bad?

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That's difficult to know if you don't have historical data that allows you to build a baseline of what

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your network typically runs at.

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If that interface in the last three months has been running at 2% utilization and now suddenly

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it's running at 90% utilization, you'll know that something has happened on your network that

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has changed the interface utilization dramatically.

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So you're going to want reports to give you performance detail over time, as well as notify you of

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issues and the availability of devices in your network.

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You're going to want to, at a glance, be able to see if there's a problem with a network device such

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as a router or if there's a problem with an individual interface on one of your routers.

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Don't forget to set the polling frequency and how granular your event notifications are.

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This will vary from one environment to another and often depends on the type of topology that you have,

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the bandwidth available and the resources you have to detect and then act on the information that you're

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receiving.

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In addition, you might need to make decisions on how quickly you need to react to an issue on your

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network.

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If something happens on your network and it effects an entire building or the entire organization,

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you're going to want to act on that quickly.

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But if something happens and it only affects a single device, that's not important, it's probably

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not as important that you get woken up at three o'clock in the morning to tell you that the port on the

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switch has gone down.