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As previously said, vendors and third party companies offer a portfolio of management solutions, which range to simple network management for small deployments, to Internet Service Provider scale solutions, from LAN to Data Center Networks.

The main goal of these platforms is to offer a unified view of the network and service status. These platforms are able to collect data from devices belonging to an administration domain via SNMP, Syslog, IPFIX, and proprietary solutions. Often they implement an automatic discovery mechanism to find and add devices to their collection base so to minimize administrator intervention. Via a GUI, they present views of the status of the network, showing time series of link and CPU load, divided by applications or origin‐destination of the traffic. The administrator is thus offered a unified view of the network status, with the ability to drill down into more details directly interacting with the GUI. They can also detect network node and connection health problems by using simple threshold‐based algorithms. In such cases, alerts can be issued to warn the administrators. Figure 1.2 reports the Zabbix architecture as an example.

Figure 1.2 Example of monitoring architecture.

Source: Courteously from Zabbix.

From an architecture point of view, all these platforms are similar. They have proxy modules, also called agent modules, to interact with different protocols and devices to collect data, which is then stored in a database module, based on open source solutions like MySQL, Postgre SQL, or commercial solutions like Oracle SQL. A typically web‐based GUI or dashboard allows the administrator to interact and navigate through the data. The dashboard can offer also configuration abilities, typically opening management connection with the devices. At last, a media gateway allows the system to raise and distribute alarms, via email, short message service, chat systems, ticketing systems, etc.

Some platforms are open source. They allow to integrate data collected from various deployment into a single centralized center, but rarely offer the ability to change the underlying configuration due to the difficulties in interfacing with different devices. Among those, Zabbix (https://www.zabbix.com), Nagios (https://www.nagios.org), or Cacti (https://www.cacti.net) are the oldest, with more modern solutions like LibreNMS (https://www.librenms.org) or Observium (https://www.observium.org) emerging as novel and more reactive solutions.

Proprietary solutions offer typically more options and flexibility, and include also the ability to change the network setup. Each vendor has a portfolio of solutions that fits different scenarios and deployment sizes, from small LANs to national‐wide Internet Service Providers. Solutions are also available from independent vendors that have typically multi‐platform support.