MPLS Network Management

Foreword

Dr. Bruce Davie,     Cisco Systems, Inc.

It is, it seems, a sad fact of networking that network management always comes last. Networking protocols are designed, implemented, and standardized, and the issue of how to manage networks that use these protocols is too often treated as an afterthought. The standardization of Management Information Bases (MIBs)—the fundamental building blocks of network management—is frequently the last task that a standardization-working group undertakes. Of course, there are some good reasons for that (it’s hard to define a MIB for a protocol that is not yet fully specified), but nevertheless, network management often seems to receive less attention than it deserves.

It appears that the world of publishing ...