System and Network Administration

(ITec4112)

Chapter Four

Resource Monitoring & Management

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 What is Network Management?
 In computer networks, network management is the operation,
administration, maintenance, and provisioning (OAMP) of
networked systems.
 Operation deals with keeping the network (and the services that the
network provides) up and running smoothly.
 Administration deals with keeping track of resources in the network
and how they are assigned.
 Maintenance is concerned with performing repairs and upgrades
 Provisioning is concerned with configuring resources in the network to
support a given service.
Network Management
 Network Management
 The overall goal of network management is to help with the
complexity of a data network and to ensure that data can go
across it with maximum efficiency and transparency to the
users
 Resources
 As stated earlier, a great deal of system administration
revolves around resources and their efficient use.
 By balancing various resources against the people and
programs that use those resources, you waste less
money and make your users as happy as possible.
 What are resources?
 How it is possible to know what resources are being used (and to
what extent)?
 The purpose of this chapter is to enable you to answer these
questions by helping you to learn more about resources and how
they can be monitored.
 Before you can monitor resources, you first have to know what
resources are to monitor.
 What are resources?
 All systems have the following resources
available:
CPU power
 Bandwidth

 Memory

 Storage

 These resources have a direct impact on system

performance, and;
 therefore, on your users’ productivity and happiness.
 At its simplest, resource monitoring is nothing more than
obtaining information concerning the utilization of one or
more system resources.
 The systems you monitor fall into one of two categories:
 The system is currently experiencing performance problems at least
part of the time and you would like to improve its performance.
 The system is currently running well and you would like it to stay that
way.
 The first category means you should monitor resources from
a system performance perspective,
 While the second category means you should monitor system
resources from a capacity planning perspective.
 System Performance Monitoring
 System performance monitoring is normally done in response
to a performance problem.
 Either the system is running too slowly, or programs (and
sometimes even the entire system) fail to run at all.
 In either case, performance monitoring is normally done as
the first and last steps of a three-step process:
 Monitoring to identify the nature and scope of the resource
shortages that are causing the performance problems.
 The data produced from monitoring is analyzed and a course
of action is taken to resolve the problem
 Monitoring to ensure that the performance problem has been
resolved
 Monitoring System Capacity
 Monitoring system capacity is done as part of an ongoing
capacity planning program.
 Capacity planning uses long-term resource monitoring to
 determine rates of change in the utilization of system

resources.
 Once these rates of change are known,
 it becomes possible to conduct more accurate long- term

planning regarding the procurement of additional

resources.
 What to Monitor?
 The resources present in every system are CPU power,
bandwidth, memory, and storage.
 Unfortunately, it is not that simple. For example, consider a
disk drive.
 What things might you want to know about its performance?
 How much free space is available?
 How many I/O operations on average does it perform each second?
 How long on average does it take each I/O operation to be
completed?
 How many of those I/O operations are reads? How many are writes?
 What is the average amount of data read/written with each I/O?
 Monitoring CPU Power
 Monitoring CPU power can be no more difficult than
determining if CPU utilization ever reaches 100%.
 If CPU utilization stays below 100%, no matter what the
system is doing, there is additional processing power
available for more work.
 However, it is a rare system that does not reach 100% CPU
utilization at least some of the time.
 At that point it is important to examine more detailed CPU
utilization data.
 By doing so, it becomes possible to start determining where
the majority of your processing power is being consumed.
 Monitoring CPU Power…
 Here are some of the more popular CPU utilization
statistics:
 User Versus System
 Context Switches
 Interrupts
 Runnable Processes
 A process may be in different states. For example, it
may be:
 Waiting for an I/O operation to complete
 Waiting for the memory management subsystem to handle
a page fault.
 In these cases, the process has no need for the CPU.
 Monitoring Bandwidth
 Monitoring bandwidth is more difficult than the other
resources. Due to the fact that
 performance statistics tend to be device-based, while most of the
places where bandwidth is important tend to be the buses/link that
connect devices.
 In those instances where more than one device shares a common
bus, you might see reasonable statistics for each device,
 But the aggregate load those devices place on the bus would be much
greater.
 However, even though 100% accurate bandwidth-related statistics
may not always be available,
 There is often enough information to make some level of analysis
possible, particularly when related statistics are taken into account.
 Monitoring Bandwidth…
 Some of the more common bandwidth-related statistics are:
 Bytes received/sent: Network interface statistics provide an
indication of the bandwidth utilization of one of the more visible buses
the network.
 Interface counts and rates: These network-related statistics can give
indications of excessive collisions, transmit and receive errors, and
more. It is possible to perform a bit of network troubleshooting even
before the more common network diagnostic tools are used.
 Transfers per Second: Normally collected for block I/O devices, such
as disk and high- performance tape drives, this statistic is a good way
of determining whether a particular device’s bandwidth limit is being
reached.
 Due to their electromechanical nature, disk and tape drives can only
perform so many I/O operations every second; their performance
degrades rapidly as this limit is reached.
 Monitoring Memory
 If there is one area where a wealth of performance statistics
can be found,
 it is in the area of monitoring memory utilization.
 Due to the inherent complexity of today’s demand-paged
virtual memory operating systems, memory utilization
statistics are many and varied.
 It is here that the majority of a system administrator’s work
with resource management takes place.
 The following statistics represent a cursory overview of
commonly-found memory management statistics:
 Monitoring Memory…
 Free, Shared, Buffered, and Cached Pages: These statistics
provide additional detail over the more simplistic active/inactive page
statistics.
 By using these statistics, it is possible to determine the overall mix of
memory utilization.
 Swap Ins/Swap Outs: These statistics show the system’s overall
swapping behavior.
 Excessive rates here can point to physical memory shortages.
 Successfully monitoring memory utilization requires a good
understanding of how demand-paged virtual memory
operating systems work, which alone could take up an entire
book.
 Monitoring Storage
 Monitoring storage normally takes place at two different
levels:
 Monitoring for sufficient disk space
 Monitoring for storage-related performance problems
 The reason for this is that it is possible to have problems in
one area and no problems whatsoever in the other.
 For example, it is possible to cause a disk drive to run out of disk
space without once causing any kind of performance-related
problems.
 Likewise, it is possible to have a disk drive that has 99% free
space, yet is being pushed past its limits in terms of
performance.
 Monitoring Storage…
 In any case, the following statistics are useful for monitoring
storage:
 Free Space: Free space is probably the one resource all system
administrators watch closely; it would be a rare administrator that
never checks on free space.
 File System-Related Statistics: These statistics (such as number of
files/directories, average file size, etc.) provide additional detail over a
single free space percentage.
 Transfers per Second: This statistic is a good way of determining
whether a particular device’s bandwidth limitations are being reached.
 Reads/Writes per Second: A slightly more detailed breakdown of
transfers per second, these statistics allow the system administrator to
more fully understand the nature of the I/O loads a storage device is
experiencing.
 Monitoring Tools
 As your organization grows, the number of servers, devices,
and services also grow .
 The term system covers all of the computing resources of
your organization.
 Users will notice performance problems with the software
that they use,
 but those problems rarely arise within that software.
 All layers of the application stack need to be examined to
find the root cause of performance issues.
 You need to head off problems with real-time status
monitoring before they occur.
 Monitoring tools help you spot errors and service failures
before they start to impact users.

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 Why do System Performance Monitoring?

 Knowing whether a computer has issues is fairly

straightforward when the computer is right in front of you.
 Knowing what’s causing the problem? That’s harder.

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 Remote Administration
 Remote administration is an approach being followed to
control either a computer system or a network or an
application or all three from a remote location
 Remote administration refers to any method of controlling a
computer from a remote location
 Remote administration is essentially adopted
 when it is difficult or impractical to a person to be physically present
and do administration on a system’s terminal.

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 Requirements to Perform Remote
Administration
 Internet connection:
 One of the fundamental requirements to perform remote
administration is network connectivity.
 Any computer with an Internet connection, TCP/IP or on a Local
Area Network can be remotely administered.

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Common Services for Remote Administration
 Remote administration is needed for
 user management,
 file system management,
 software installation/configuration,
 network management,
 Network Security/Firewalls etc.
 The following are some of the tasks/ services for which
remote administration need to be done:
 General or Controlling one’s own computer from a remote location
 ICT Infrastructure Management
 Hacking
 Remote Desktop Solutions

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 Cont’d
 Some of proprietary and open source applications that can
be used for remote administration.
 SSH (Secure Shell)
 OpenSSH (OpenBSD Secure Shell
 Telnet
 rlogin
 Rsh
 AetherPal and Netop are some of the tools used for full wireless
remote access

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 Network Printers
 Network printing allows us to efficiently use printing
resources.
 With network printing we first connect all of our work
stations to a network and then we implement a network
printer.
 In general there are two ways this can be done.
 In first method we take a regular printer and plug it into the back of
one of the PCs.
 And we share that printer on the network by going to the printer
properties in Windows.

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 Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or Independent)
Disks (RAID)
 RAID is a data storage virtualization technology that
combines multiple physical disk drive components into one
or more logical units for the purposes of data redundancy,
performance improvement, or both.
 This was in contrast to the previous concept of highly
reliable mainframe disk drives referred to as Single Large
Expensive Disk (SLED).
 Data is distributed across the drives in one of several ways,
referred to as RAID levels, depending on the required level
of redundancy and performance.
 RAID 0
 RAID 1
 RAID 2
 RAID 3
 RAID 4
 RAID 5 26
 Thank you !!
Any Question?