Managing Networks
Network management is essential for maintaining visibility, stability, and control over your infrastructure. Without proper monitoring and synchronization, even well-designed networks can become unreliable or difficult to troubleshoot. This topic introduces the tools and protocols that network engineers use daily to keep devices coordinated, secure, and performing at their best.
Discovery and Monitoring
You’ll start by learning about device discovery protocols like CDP and LLDP, which reveal topology information and simplify troubleshooting across multi-vendor environments. You’ll then explore Syslog for centralized event logging and NTP for accurate time synchronization, both critical for tracking incidents and correlating logs.
SNMP Monitoring
Next, you’ll study Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), which allows you to monitor devices remotely and gather performance metrics. You’ll see how SNMPv2c enables basic polling and notifications, while SNMPv3 adds authentication and encryption to protect management data. Understanding SNMP helps you identify link failures, detect interface errors, and automate device reporting to improve the reliability of your network monitoring system.
Configuration Management and File Transfers
In this part, you’ll review configuration management concepts, including the difference between running and startup configurations, ensuring devices retain consistent settings after reboots. You’ll also learn how FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol) are used to upload, download, or back up configuration files and IOS images. These file transfer protocols play a key role in maintaining device reliability, simplifying recovery, and streamlining upgrades during system maintenance.