Planning of Infrastructural Development

Another field in which network analysis is important is the planning of the infrastructure. A network administrator needs to know how loaded the network backbone is, and the more exact information he has about the nature of the traffic on his network, the better he can determine what he will have to improve next. For this reason, it is important to have as detailed measurement information as possible. Conventionally, the network administrator would just check counters (for example using SNMP tools like HP OpenView, shown in Figure 1.1, or possibly RMON probes) for his link or maybe just watch collision LEDs to determine how loaded the link is. Once he decides that there are too much collisions, he will try to replace the medium by a faster one or split it into multiple segments. However, this does not allow him at all to determine the applications that are responsible for the traffic growth. If for example the traffic growth on a LAN would be only due to an increased number of people surfing the World Wide Web, the administrator would eventually better add a new proxy server for this LAN segment than just split it into two segments.

  

Figure 1.1: SNMP Counter Graph generated with HP OpenView

Not less important is to do continued measurements over longer periods of time. Doing this allows the network adminstrator to get early insights in trends for new protocols being used. New kinds of applications often result in new needs for the networking equipment. Therefore it is important for the administrator to recognize those trends as soon as possible.