Mailinglist Archive

Building a Network Management System
by Mark Cooper, in Editorials - Sun, Mar 13th 2005 00:00 PDT

What is an NMS?

The normal definition of NMS is "Network Management System". This is 
nice and easy to say, but very hard to pin down to an exact 
specification. What constitutes a well-rounded NMS?

I believe it to consist of at least:

    1. Up/Downtime Monitoring
    2. Reporting
    3. Configuration Change Management
    4. IP/Asset Management
    5. Security
    6. Event Correlation/Root Cause
    7. Alerting

There are a large number of Free/Open Source Software and commercial 
systems that claim to be NMSes, but none come close to covering all this 
functionality. Typically, systems fall into either a Network Monitoring 
(Up/Down) or Network Reporting role, not both.

http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/1553/