An abundance of network management utilities from Cisco and other suppliers underscores the importance and complexity of supporting IT infrastructure. Progent's Cisco-certified network management engineers are expert at assisting businesses develop management solutions based on Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), SYSLOG services, and NetFlow protocols to build powerful mechanisms for tracking network utilization and latency, viewing key router and switch performance metrics, and identifying traffic patterns, applications, and devices that use available services.

Progent can help businesses to utilize a rich range of free and license-based monitoring and management products to maintain a Cisco network. Tools familiar to Progent's engineers include Cacti, Nagios, Paessler Router Traffic Grapher, Cisco Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM), Cisco Monitor Manager, Cisco Network Assistant, Cisco Security Manager, OpenView, AlterPoint DeviceAuthority, Adventnet Netflow, Big Brother, Solarwinds Orion, and Necordia NetMRI.

Network management tools can help IT administrators to be aware of existing network utilization and intelligently plan for downstream traffic increases. Network management tools can also be used to highlight poor or improper uses of network services, such as streaming multimedia, peer-to-peer file sharing, etc. that can eat up expensive or limited network bandwidth. A carefully planned network management strategy can also help organizations to arrive at informed decisions on WAN and LAN enhancements once they understand the amount of system resources historically required at any one time.

Having an efficient network management solution in operation in advance is vital to prevent major disruptions that can result from Denial Of Service attacks and malicious viruses/Trojans. These events can render the network unstable and without proper utilities it can be difficult, and in some cases practically impossible, to find the source of the problem.

Network Management Solutions from Cisco
Cisco has developed a variety of powerful tools that should be the basis for any network management solution. Utilized in combination with the top third-party tools, Cisco's network management offerings can enhance the business value of networks for organizations of any size by improving important areas such as system utilization, performance, resilience, protection, repair, and scalability. Cisco's most popular network management tools include:

Cisco ASDM is a web utility that allows you to set up and monitor the management utilities built into security devices. ASDM is installed by the Cisco appliance, and allows you to configure, track, and manage the device.

Cisco Monitor Manager is a management solution intended to meet the needs of small and midsize organizations. Cisco Monitor Manager actively tracks key appliance parameters on voice/data networks serving 5 to 250 workers and with up to 250 VoIP phones. Cisco Monitor Manager offers:

• Up-to-date tracking of important appliance parameters on small and midsize business-class network appliances, Cisco Communications Manager Express, Cisco Unity Express, security appliances, access points, and IP phones
• Support for the Unified Communications 500 Series appliance for organizations with as many as 50 users

• Network discovery and topology
• Device and process looks at Unified Communications deployment
• Networkwide inventory logging and reporting
• Advanced security and reliable operation
• Device operations monitoring
• Cisco Unified IP Telephony monitoring
• Connection status and traffic tracking
• Immediate alerts and event notification
• Documentation
• Configuration log

Network Assistant is a PC-hosted management tool designed for for wired and wireless LANs (WLANs) for growing companies that have as many as 40 Cisco switches and routers. By utilizing Smartports technology, Network Assistant streamlines setup, deployment, and ongoing administration and maintenance of Cisco-based networks. Cisco Network Assistant provides a unified system view and permits IT managers to deploy its functions among switches, routers, and wireless access points.

Security Manager is a powerful but easy-to-use solution for managing all facets of appliance configuration and security policies for Cisco firewalls, virtual private networks (VPNs), and IPS. Cisco Security Manager efficiently manages even small environments consisting of fewer than ten appliances, but also expands to manage enterprise systems composed of thousands of devices. Expansion is enabled via smart policy-based management techniques that can streamline administrative overhead. Highlights of Cisco Security Manager include:

• Supports control of Cisco routers configured with an IOS security software image, Cisco ASA 5500 Series firewalls, PIX security appliances, IPS 4200 sensors, and Catalyst 6500 security services modules
• Respond more quickly to attacks: specify and assign new security policies to many hundreds of appliances in a few easy steps
• Rich graphical user interface offers exceptional ease-of-use
• A variety of views that offer flexible methods to manage appliances and security policies including the ability to manage the security environment graphically on a system topology map
• Comprehensive animated training for the new operator to speed up training time
• Centrally call out which policies are shared and inherited by new devices to ensure corporate policies are configured consistently, while providing sufficient flexibility to modify policies at the local device level
• Ability to build a single firewall rule database for all Cisco platforms with smart analysis of firewall policies to detect anomalies in the rule base
• Quickly set up location-to-location, hub-and-spoke, full-mesh IPSec, or extranet Virtual Private Network interfaces with a VPN wizard
• Compatibility with Cisco ACS for granular role based connection control to appliances and administration functions
• Integration with security MARS to correlate monitored data against corresponding firewall rules to help with quicker management decisions and increased network availability
• Ability to assign particular jobs to each administrator in the course of the implementation of a rule, with formal change control and logging; allows the security and network operations team to act together as a single group with effective teamwork

Progent can also show you how to use network management applications to analyze and classify system data to implement traffic shaping, which allows you to program routers to impose different bandwidth restrictions on designated types of processes based on the importance you specify. By buffering and sorting data packets above your committed volume, and by assigning preference to the most important processes, traffic shaping can prevent service provider overage charges from spinning out of reach and/or avoid gaps in worker productivity resulting from indiscriminate enforcement of your network traffic volume limits during peak demand.

Progent's CISM and CISSP security consultants can assist you to develop an end-to-end security strategy that incorporates your network management solution, and Progent's remote and in person network specialists and Cisco CCIE-certified engineers can use the latest network monitoring and analysis technology to identify and fix problems quickly to keep your network in business.

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