This question list (like all others) will grow with time. If you would like to see something included, mail me.
1) What is network management?
The International Organization for Standards has defined five key areas of network management. These are: fault management, configuration management, security management, performance management, and accounting management.
It can formally be defined as: the process or controlling a complex data network as to maximize its efficiency and productivity (Fang, 6).
2) How can I most effectively manage my network?
The best way in which a network can be managed is to attain each of the five above areas of network management the most efficiently. To aid in this task, network protocols are used so that the process of network management is automated (ie. run by computers) as much as possible.
3) What kind of network management protocols are available?
There are many protocols available. The two mainstream protocols however are SNMP (the Simple Network Management Protocol) and CMIP (the Common Management Information Protocol). Generally, SNMP works under the TCP/IP (Transport Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol) communication stack and CMIP works under the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) communication stack (more on these stacks in their respective sections).
4) What information can these protocols provide?
The information the SNMP and CMIP can attain from a network is defined as a MIB (management information base). The MIB is structured like a tree. At the top of the tree is the most general information available about a network. Each branch of the tree then gets more detailed into a specific network area, with the leaves of the tree as specific as the MIB can get. For instance, devices may be a parent in the tree, its children being serial devices and parallel devices. The value of these may be 6 , 2, 4 accordingly; with the numbers corresponding to the number of devices attached (4 parallel + 2 serial = 6 total devices). I will refer to each node in the MIB tree as a variable (hence in the above example, devices, serial devices, and parallel devices are all variables, their values being 6, 2, 4 accordingly). The top of a LAN MIB tree is usually referred to as "internet".
5) How many MIB trees are there?
There is only one MIB tree defined by ISO. However, part of this tree has sections for vendor-specific extensions. Usually each vendor-specific network has its own MIB that contains its own variable names (for instance, IBM has its own MIB, as does Sun, HP, etc..). Although the variable names may be different, the information contained in each vendor-specific MIB tree is generally the same.
6) What are network layers?
Many books have been written about this subject alone. My answer to this question is thus going to be very brief and high-level. If anyone has any better explanations, please forward them to me. In short, the International Standards Organization defined a seven-layer model that applies to communication along and between most types of computer networks. In this model, each layer, n, relies on all layers below it (n-1), (n-2) .. 1 to complete its communication tasks; the goal of this model being an efficient network communication system. The seven layers are (in order of lowest to highest): Physical, Data Link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, and Application. E-mail for instance is a task of the Application layer. The Application layer though uses all of the layers below it to deliver the e-mail (eg. the presentation layer formats the look of the e-mail and the physical layer actually transports the binary data across the network).
A good reference is: Naugle, Matthew G. Local Area Networking. (McGraw-Hill: New York), 1991.
7) Where can I find out more?
Seeing that this site is NOT about network management, the above was a brief summary of network management and should help in the understanding of the following sections. There are LOTS of books available on this subject. Since network management is always changing though I recommend books written in the past few years. Anything else runs the risk of being embarrassingly out of date. A good book I used was:
Fang, Karen and Allan Leinwand. Network Management: A Practical Perspective. (Addison-Wesley), 1993.