Network Performance Management

Week 2: Bandwidth optimization

Table of Contents

-- Tip: Optimizing bandwidth for the enterprise
-- Tip: Optimizing Internet bandwidth with link load balancing
-- Tip: Networks are like onions
-- Tip: Invisible traffic that steals bandwidth
-- Tip: What Ping doesn't tell you
-- Tip: Numbers lie: Your NIC could be killing your network performance
-- Q&A: How do you interpret a bandwidth utilization graph?
-- Q&A: Can you explain the ICMP ping test?
-- Q&A: What is the difference between symmetric and asymmetric bandwidth?
-- Q&A: I am experiencing unexplained bandwidth utilization, and constant timeouts. How do I begin troubleshooting?

-- Chapter Download: Open Source Network Administration, Chapter 3(PDF)
In this book, MIT netadmin James M. Kretchmar presents an extraordinary collection of open source tools for streamlining and improving virtually every facet of network administration. Regardless of your experience or your network's size, these flexible tools can help with everything from management and monitoring to optimization and troubleshooting. This featured chapter describes MRTG. MRTG produces Web pages that display graphs of bandwidth use on network links on daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly scales. This can be an invaluable tool for diagnosing network problems because it not only indicates the current status of the network but also lets you visually compare this with the history of network utilization. (Copyright 2005. All rights reserved. This chapter, titled "MRTG" is posted with permission from Prentice Hall PTR.)

Week 3: Performing a network analysis

Table of Contents

-- Article: Preaching the merits of protocol analysis
-- Article: Practices for monitoring a network's performance
-- Tip: Network fault analysis: Putting the guru in the analyzer
-- Tip: Onsite network analysis
-- Tip: Analyzing your network: Statistical monitoring vs. real-time performance
-- Tip: Looking for trouble: ICMP and IP statistics to watch
-- Tip: Performance command line utilities
-- Tip: What is that port?
-- Tip: Logical Fault Isolation in six steps
-- Tip: Ports to watch
-- Tip: Advanced packet filtering
-- Tip: Working with log files
-- Q&A: Checking for high network utilization on a switched network
-- Q&A: What's the difference between packet "sniffers" and protocol analyzers?
-- Q&A: Can you suggest a network monitoring and packet analysis application that includes reporting capabilities?

Chapter download: Network Analysis, Architecture and Design, Chapter 1
This chapter introduces the analysis, architecture, and design processes. Described are the fundamental concepts of the processes of network analysis, architecture, and design; systems and services; as well as their characteristics and prepares the reader for the analysis process.

Week 4: Preventing downtime

Table of Contents

Network diagnostic tools offer you the ability to take preventative measures to guard against network downtime. Read about some valuable methods and tools.

-- Tip: Calculate the cost of downtime (ROI calculator)
-- Tip: The network's down - Top down approach to troubleshooting
-- Tip: Building an incident report
-- Tip: Logical Fault Isolation in six steps
-- Tip: The shutdown event tracker
-- Tip: Practicing network management vs. crisis management
-- Tip: Testing: One, two, three
-- Webcast: Ten tips in 10 minutes: Ten tips for downtime prevention
-- Chapter download: What All Network Administrators Know

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