Need some info on network management

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1

Hi,

I am a Post Graduate student from India and network
management is my area of interest. I have been
browsing through the net on different network
management tools available in the market. In all of
them, accounting management which is one of the FCAPS
functionality is not supported on any of the NMS's.

So I thought it would make sense if I contact a
network operations group regarding this. Can you
please throw some light on the following -
1. Why is "accounting" not part of most of the NMS's?
2. What do service providers use for billing their
customers?

It would be great if you could help me on this.

Thanks a lot for your valuable time!

Regards,
Savitha

2

them, accounting management which is one of the FCAPS
functionality is not supported on any of the NMS's.

I think you have your networking models confused.

FCAPS is part of the ITU model for TMN-layers. You
need to look at ITU networks, such as the telephone
network, which extensively collects accounting data.

Trying to apply ITU network models to the Internet
will just make your head hurt.

So I thought it would make sense if I contact a
network operations group regarding this. Can you
please throw some light on the following -
1. Why is "accounting" not part of most of the NMS's?
2. What do service providers use for billing their
customers?

Because most Internet providers have a different billing
model. In the Internet, accounting is usually part
of AAA systems not NMS systems.

Of course, on the Internet NMS systems are not the same
thing as NMS in the ITU model either. I'm not arguing one
model is better than the other, but its a bad idea to
try to apply the wrong model to the wrong network.

3

Thanks! What are the capabilities that are looked for,
in a NMS for Internet??

--- Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote: > On Tue,
10 Feb 2004, [iso-8859-1] Savitha Kumar