Manageability

Networks are like living things that need to be taken care of and often change with time due to new requirements being put on the networks to cater to new services. Network operations is the discipline that involves monitoring the network on a real-time basis to monitor the network performance and to detect any incidents such as link failures, device failures, link congestion, and so on. The network operator needs to be able to monitor the network, detect and analyze any inputs received from the network, and then take corrective action based on the criticality or business impact that the events have on the network.

The network design has a lot of bearing on the correlation of the network events in the case of outages or performance degradations on the network. If the network design is too complex, the events cannot be correlated easily and the time to take a decision on the corrective action to be taken gets prolonged. This can cause network outages, or prolonged business disruptions, that are detrimental to business.

Manageability of the network requires that the network design is simple so that the network operator can intuitively analyze the network events to ensure continuous availability of services and applications for the business.

Manageability can be enhanced using automation and orchestration tools, where standard protocols and tools are used to take care of the repetitive tasks. The evolution of SDN and the availability of a lot of custom applications that use the standard-based APIs of the network devices or the SDN controllers is helping network operators manage the network effectively.