Network monitoring system development: A unified multi-vendor network monitoring system.

Abstract

Network monitoring is the first step in providing and guaranteeing delivery of mobile communication services of uncompromising quality. From enabling quick responsiveness to network failures, to allowing for predictive network capacity requirements projections, network monitoring systems have quite a wide range of important uses. Most current network monitoring systems are challenged in not being able to monitor multivendor products. Those that are, come with prohibitive and punitive feature and license activation fees as well as vendor support fees. Therefore a web-based multi-vendor network monitoring system was developed using open source software to undertake real-time monitoring of mobile network elements. Written in Python programming language, the system is capable of monitoring a number of different vendor equipment without the need for paying exorbitant support and feature activation license fees. This research work is part of a larger project for a unified network monitoring solution that included SNMP based data collection mechanisms and graphical user interface development.