 Hello. My name is Robert Moore. I've been teaching Cisco classes now for 15-plus years. In those 15-plus years, I also worked at a Cisco Regional Networking Academy in Neustadt by Kohlberg in Germany for five years. Besides teaching, I also do consulting in the networking realm throughout Europe and the United States. Some of my clients were the United States military, Mercedes-Benz, Deutsche Telekom, as well as diverse German government entities, just to name a few. I also hold several Cisco certifications as well as a master's degree in information technology. Now, our chapter one objectives will be to describe maintenance models and mythologies. Now these maintenance models and mythologies were created to help the network engineer with these daily tasks of monitoring, troubleshooting, and maintaining his network. It can be used in large corporate enterprise type of networks all the way to the medium sized company all the way down to the small business. Now included in these maintenance models and mythologies are other plans and procedures and processes such as network maintenance plan or disaster recovery processes. We will also talk about some common network maintenance tools or applications and resources that can be used to help you with your daily maintaining, troubleshooting, and monitoring your network. So that brings us basically to the importance of network monitoring and performance measurement and we'll also explain how to work with backup and restore services. Now maintenance models and mythologies are there to help a network engineer to figure out what tasks to include in different areas. As you can see here, we have some things that could be related to device insulation maintenance. Some of these tasks could be installing devices and software as well as creating and backing up configurations and software. When it comes to failure response, tasks could be things such as supporting users that experience network problems or troubleshooting device or link failures, even replacing equipment and restoring backups. On the other hand, when we're talking about network performance such things as capacity planning, performance tuning, and usage monitoring. On the business procedure side of things, we want to always make sure that we include things such as documenting, compliance, auditing, and service level agreement management. And when it comes to security, you should always follow and implement security procedures as well as security auditing. Now there are two different ways of approaching troubleshooting within a network and those two areas could be proactive versus reactive. So there are benefits of something known as a structure maintenance over a so-called interrupt driven maintenance. And is it exactly that what proactive versus reactive is talking about? We're talking about the difference between structure maintenance over interrupt driven maintenance. Obviously, structure maintenance is proactive whereas interrupt driven maintenance is reactive. And so there are benefits to a structure maintenance over an interrupt driven maintenance and some of those benefits are, for instance, reduced network downtime. So what you want to do is you want to discover and prevent problems before they happen. This means you want to maximize your so-called mean time between failures and minimize mean time to repair. Other benefits are more cost effectiveness. So performance monitoring and capacity planning for budgeting and future network needs and choosing proper equipment for better price performance ratio over the lifetime of equipment. And of course, another benefit or feature of a structure maintenance would be a better alignment with your business objectives. Time and resources are allocated to processes based on importance to the business instead of prioritizing tasks and assigning budgets based on incidents. For example, upgrades in major maintenance jobs are not scheduled, of course, during critical business hours, but usually done off time after everybody's left in the evening hours and the morning hours before somebody comes back to work. That's also over the weekends. Higher network security is another benefit of a structure maintenance. Attention to network security is part of course of a structure network maintenance. Up-to-date prevention and detection mechanisms can notify staff through logs and alarms. These can be sent immediately to your smartphone. They can be sent via emails, even text messages. And monitoring allows you to observe network vulnerabilities and needs and justify plans for strengthening your network security. Now here are some different maintenance models and some very common ones that are out there. The most probably used and the most known is the IDIL, ITIL stands for IT Infrastructure Library. Now, this is a framework of best practices for IT service management. Now, ITIL or IDIL describes best practices to help in providing high quality IT services that are aligned with your business needs and processes. This particular framework was developed by the UK Office of Government Commerce. Other models are the ISOs, FCAPS. Now the FCAPS are the first letters basically for the different categories within the FCAPS model and mythologies. Fault management is what the F stands for. Configuration management is what the C stands for. The accounting management is what the A stands for. The B stands for performance management and then the S for security management. Very similar to what we saw on the previous slide, but again, like I said, the FCAPS stands for fault management, configuration management, accounting management, performance management and security management. There is actually, if you want more information on the FCAPS, there is actually a whole Cisco press book that is dedicated to this particular topic and it may be interesting if you want to actually use this within your environment. Others are, for instance, the ITUT's Telecommunications Management Network. Now the ITUT integrated and refined the FCAPS model to create this approach, which defines a framework for the management of telecommunication networks versus IT networks. And then we also have a Cisco Lifecycle Services Phases, known as PPDIOO. This particular model, which is Cisco proprietary, is there to help businesses successfully deploy, operate and optimize Cisco technologies in the network. The PPDIOO stands for Prepare, Plan, Design, Implement, Operate and Optimize. So network maintenance tasks are usually considered part of the operate and optimize phase of the cycle. Now here is an example of procedures and tools for the configuration management element of the FCAPS. So if you look all the way to the far left, the column that's labeled Model, you'll see basically the FCAPS model with its different components, so fault management, configuration management, accounting management, performance management and security management. We're going to be looking particularly at the configuration management for this example here. In this center, you will see the procedures used with the configuration management component and at the far right, you'll see the tools column that will actually be used for the different procedures. So if you follow me, please, from the model column, you go to the configuration management bullet and then you follow across with the arrow to the configuration management procedures. You will see just things as a schedule configuration backups. Very important. You want to make sure always that you do regular backups. These will, of course, will be very vital to you, especially if the system fails and you have complex network configurations on switches, routers, firewalls, and so on and so forth. It's much quicker to bring them back from backups instead of actually having to redo them from scratch. You can also do manual backup as part of your change procedure to make sure that, you know, backed up that are very vital at that moment when they take place instead of waiting for the schedule configuration backups. You can do automatic configuration checking or you can have mirrored off-site backups for disaster recovery. Now looking at each one of these different procedures, we have tools that we can use to actually make these or implement these. For the schedule configuration backups, for instance, you have the NMS capable of scheduling backups. When it comes to manual backups as part of your change procedure, you could use an FTP server for your config backups. So for your files, basically, that you have created for your servers, your switches, your routers, and, of course, for your firewalls as well. Automatic configuration checking. Again, you can use your NMS capable of configuring comparisons. And then for your mirrored off-site backups for disaster recovery, you can do a backup system for your FTP server. So again, these types of flow charts are very useful when you're implementing certain models. In this case, like I said, we're looking at the FCAPS model and it lets you allow you to take the model itself and then a certain component, like in our example, the configuration management, and then what procedures fall on the configuration management and what tools we could use to actually implement these different procedures. So taking a look, basically, at network maintenance processes and procedures, a network maintenance plan can include procedures for many tasks, including the following. Accommodating ads, moves, and changes. Now this affects users, computers, printers, servers, and phones, and even potential changes in configuration and cabling. Other tasks, such as installation and configuration of new devices, includes actually adding ports, capacity, and network devices. Can be handled by a different group within an organization or by an external party or even by internal staff. Other things could be things such as other tasks could be replacement of failed devices done through service contracts or by in-house support engineers. Backup and device configurations in software, again, good backups of both software and configurations can simplify and reduce the time the recovery process takes for failed services. It's a must that things are backed up. Troubleshooting link and device failures, diagnosing and resolving failures related to network components, links, or service provider connections are essential tasks within a network engineer's job. Software upgrading or patching. Again, this requires that you stay informed of available software upgrades or patches and use them if necessary. This can address critical performance or security vulnerabilities. Network monitoring, monitoring operation of the devices and user activity can be performed using simple mechanisms such as router and firewall logs or by using sophisticated network monitoring applications that can be purchased either through Cisco or other third-party vendors. Performance measurement and capacity planning. This can help determine when to upgrade links or equipment and justify the cost for such upgrades. Facilitates planning for upgrades. This is known as capacity planning to help prevent bottlenecks, congestion, and failures. Writing and updating documentation, a much neglected part of good maintenance processes and procedures. Again, this is used for current network documentation, is used for referencing during implementation, administration, and troubleshooting is a mandatory network maintenance task. Now let's go ahead and take a look at network maintenance planning. Networks maintenance planning is part of most network maintenance processes and procedures, and there are different components that comprise the network maintenance plan. One of those components is the scheduling maintenance. Now, this reduces network downtime that prevent long-term maintenance tasks from being forgotten, disruptive maintenance tasks are scheduled during assigned maintenance windows. Another thing that's included in a network maintenance plan are formalizing change control procedures. Which changes require authorization and who is responsible? What kind of preparation is needed? What verification is required? Does documentation need to be updated? These are all sorts of questions you must ask yourself when it comes to formalizing change control procedures. Another component is established in network documentation procedures. This includes network drawings, can use a tool such as Vizio, for instance, connection documentation, equipment lists, IP address administration, configuration and design documentation are all part of this so-called network documentation procedures. Another task could be established effective communication. Who is making changes and when? Are effective parties aware of the changes and results? What conclusions can be drawn? Many questions that you should ask yourself when it comes to establishing effective communication. Now, defining template procedures and conventions are another component of the network maintenance plan. Examples include logging and debugging time stamps, settings, for instance, local time or UTC, access list guidelines, end with always an explicit deny any, which is usually at the bottom anyway of any access control list. But for the beginning, network engineers, this may be a good idea to always make sure it's there that they understand it's there, because usually it's hidden. IP subnet and address assignments, address allocated to the local gateway. Another important component of the network maintenance plan is planning for disaster recovery. This includes replacement hardware, current software and configuration information, tools that could be used, licenses of applicable and knowledge of the procedures required.