Network Management and Operations

Course Overview
Hi everyone. My name is Ross Bagurden, and welcome to my course, Network Management and Operations. I am a network engineer with more than 20 years' experience building enterprise networks and teaching people about them. Data networking hardware demands constant attention and maintenance in order to continuously move traffic. In this course, we'll look at the needs an engineer requires to maintain a data network including documentation and diagrams, disaster recovery plans, remote access, as well as network monitoring solutions. By the end of this course, you'll understand the need for and purpose of an SMFP server, as well as the value of having an effective change management system. This course builds upon the content in Enterprise Network Infrastructure and upon completion will allow you to move onto the fourth of five courses in this series called Network Security Fundamentals. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn network operations with the Network Management and Operations course at Pluralsight.

Network Documentation
Welcome to Pluralsight. I'm Ross Bagurdes. This next course, we're going to discuss Network Management and Operations topics. We'll start off by discussing network documentation itself. There's going to be a lot of documentation here. This particular module is going to focus on documentation that allows us to keep our network up and running. We're going to start with the most important, at least in my mind, the most important component of network documentation, and that is drawings. We're going to look at three different types of drawings here. One, we're going to look at a data center and see how we draw up and label a data center. The second one we'll look at here is an IDF or MDF. These may be unusual terms for you. We'll find out what they are and why we call them that in a little bit. Last, we're going to look at some network drawings themselves to see how we can document the logical and physical infrastructure of our network in a drawing on a piece of paper or on the computer. We'll look at several other types of written documentation and procedures as well and see how they can be used to support our data network.

Disaster Recover and Business Continuity
Welcome to Pluralsight. I'm Ross Bagurdes. In this module, we're going to discuss disaster recovery and business continuity. These are incredibly important design considerations in a business network, and we're going to look at what's required to accomplish that. I've also got a great story that I'll tell you at some point in this module about a vice president who abandoned all business continuity and disaster recovery after he made a terrible conclusion about redundant systems. Anyway, module goals. We're going to talk about network service availability and how that's important to a business running. We'll look at what the redundancy needs are. Why do we need this redundancy? We'll take a look at some data center redundancy requirements here, including redundancy within the data center and redundancy between data centers. We'll look at backups and see how backups are incredibly critical and see the different types of backups we can use. And last, we're going to look at some business documentation that helps support disaster recovery, business continuity, basically keeping network services running.

Network Monitoring
Welcome to Pluralsight. I'm Ross Bagurdes. This next module, we're going to do some network monitoring discussions and talk about why this is incredibly valuable in data networking. As a matter of fact, in almost every single organization out there today that has some type of networked resources, most likely you either have an internal system for network monitoring, or you're going to contract it out to some other organization to monitor your systems. The engineers that run the network operations centers that monitor your network, those are called NOC techs, or N-O-C techs, Network Operation Center technicians. And these topics that we're going to cover in Network Monitoring are almost exactly what you're going to find a NOC tech using on a day-to-day basis or even an hour- to-hour basis, so let's get started. Our goals of this module will be to look at what the need is for network monitoring. We're going to take a look at device logs, or syslogs. Also we're going to look at something called SNMP, alright my list of topics here is getting shorter and shorter and shorter and less descriptive. SNMP is a protocol, simple network management protocol, that we use to go collect information about devices. Then we're going to look at some other network monitoring needs here.

Remote Network Management
Welcome to Pluralsight. I'm Ross Bagurdes. Right now we're going to talk about remote access, which is a way of allowing network administrators and sometimes users access into a data network, so they can offer some type of remote management of that network or allow users to do some work services that they need to complete. We'll start off by talking about some network management utilities and see how we can allow network administrators the ability to access devices remotely. Oftentimes you, the administrator, might be 5 miles, 10 miles, 100 miles away from the equipment that you're supporting, and every time you need to make a change, you don't want to have to get in your car and drive 100 miles to go make that change. Second one we're going to look at here is virtual private networks. This allows users to connect securely into a data network. We'll also look at utilities for transferring files. We've looked at some of this before. These are the FTP, file transfer protocol, and its variants that we'll take a look at.

Policies and Best Practices
Welcome to Pluralsight. I'm Ross Bagurdes. This next section, we're going to talk about policies and best practices. This often can include procedures as well. So let's get started. The goals of this module are to talk about user policies, device and software policies, sensitive information policies, and safety procedures and policies. Alright, that's a lot of policies. So let's get started, and I'll try to not say policies so much. Let's start by talking about IT policies and procedures. What I've done here is I have broken down common policies and procedures used within organizations into several categories here. The first is users, then devices and software, sensitive information, and then safety, meaning physical safety so you don't slip and fall, things like that.