Network management is the use of tools that pertain to the operation, administration and provisioning of networked systems. Operation is the continuous monitoring of the network for problems, and once identified, the proper fixing of the problems before the they become widespread. Thus operation refers to keeping the network “up and running” smoothly. Maintaining the correct operation of every network component is of much importance to avoid domino effects that ultimately result in total network failure.
Administration refers to observing all the resources of the network, to see how are they utilized and so on. The main goal of administration is to ensure appropriate usage of the network resources. Finally, provisioning means making the services of the network available to its users. When a user needs a particular service, there must an easy way to facilitate the request and that service upon deployment must also be monitored for maintaining the sanity of the network.
This thesis concentrates upon providing various means to monitor a network, and various tools were created to enable the network administrators to prevent the nodes from not going down. The chapters covered are centric towards Wired Nodes on a local area network, to a wireless mobile device based monitoring. Experiments were also run on what is called the “Academic Cloud ” to analyze the capability of perfSONAR, which helps one to monitor the problem associated with wide area networks.