Friday, March 28, 2008

RMON (Remote Monitoring)

RMON (which stands for Remote Monitoring) is a data-gathering and analysis tool that was developed to help alleviate some of the shortcomings of SNMP. RMON works in a similar manner, and its objects are defined in an MIB. RMON can also be thought of as a specialized SNMP MIB for use with remote monitoring devices. It was designed to work much like the LAN analyzer discussed RFCs 1757, "Remote Network Monitoring Management Information Base," and 1513, "Token-Ring Extensions to the Remote Network Monitoring MIB," provide the standard MIB definitions for RMON for Ethernet and Token-Ring networks, respectively.

In SNMP, the roles of the manager and agent are those of a client and server, with the agents being the client of the management console software. In RMON, the agents (often called probes) are the active parties and become the server while one or more management consoles can be their clients.

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Instead of the management console performing a periodic polling process to gather data and perform analysis from agents out in the field, the agents in RMON perform intelligent analysis and send SNMP traps to management consoles when significant events occur.

Using RMON, the administrator can get an end-to-end view of the network. The types of data collected and the alerts and actions that are associated with RMON are different than those of the standard SNMP type. The objects for RMON fall into the following MIB groups:

l StatisticsThis group records data collected about network interfaces. A table called EtherStatsTable contains one entry for each interface to hold this data and also contains control parameters for this group. Statistics include traffic volume, packet sizes, and errors.

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