Trend Analysis
When faced with most network problems, it’s nice to have some kind of historical record to give you an idea of when things started going wrong. This allows you to go back and review what happened before a problem appeared, and possibly prevent it from recurring. If you want to be proactive about diagnosing problems before they appear, it is essential to know what “normal” means for your network -- you need a set of baseline statistics that show you how your network normally behaves. While many of the bigger packages do some trend reporting, they can be clunky and hard to use. They might not even provide you with the kind of information you need. Once you see what a dedicated trend-analysis system can do, you will see why it might be worth the time, energy, and money to integrate one into your network-monitoring scheme.
If your environment calls for some serious monitoring, you should look into getting RMON probes. RMON probes are a great addition to trend-analysis packages, since most trend packages can make use of the kind of data these probes gather. The rest of this section lists some trend-analysis packages.
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