Preparing for growth — In the longer term, network management can help you with exact forecasting. As the complexity and interconnectivity of networks grow exponentially, understanding usage trends can help you develop detailed plans to add network capacity in advance of demand.
Where to Start
Network management can seem daunting. For many telcos, especially smaller service providers, challenges can include recruiting and retaining the professionals needed to provide round-the-clock monitoring. Fortunately, there are strategies to help you make the most of your resources.
Updates arenʼt just for bugs — Software updates are crucial to network management, unlocking the latest features and eliminating bugs. But updates have other advantages, including patches that protect against security vulnerabilities.
In addition, keeping pace with updates can improve interactions with vendors. Whether youʼre managing your network with a small team or relying on remote backup, eventually every telco has issues that need vendor support. Often, those vendors require your network to run the latest software before troubleshooting begins. A policy for consistent updates will help you get support as quickly as possible.
Keep it clean — Too often, as networks develop and expand, redundant or unnecessary nodes are left behind and never cleaned up. Maybe four servers do a job that would be assigned to one server if the network was built from scratch today. Or, your system might still run configurations for sites eliminated long ago.
Removing redundancies and deleting unnecessary configurations makes your network more efficient. Also, your monitoring systems will no longer set off alarms after detecting these redundancies as issues.
As network managers, weʼre often reluctant to make network changes without an immediate problem. However, the overall health of your network will benefit if you set up policies to clean up once services are disconnected or changed.
Learn from experience — These habits and many other best practices for network management come with experience. Is your team failing to actively manage your network or are changes infrequent? If so, your network configuration can become inconsistent. Team turnover, particularly the loss of an experienced network engineer, can exacerbate these