I just finished reading the book titled, “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell. It is an interesting book where the author contends that people unconsciously make first impressions of a situation, person etc which carries through in how they react to that situation or that person long after the initial encounter. In fact the author discusses the concept of “thin slicing” wherein he believes that the unconscious system in a person is able to process/assess a situation with very small amounts of information very rapidly and more often than not arrive at the right answer or the correct way to handle the situation. This is especially true in a crisis or in a emergency situation. He shares an interesting anecdote as narrated by Vic Braden,a world class tennis coach, where Vic is able to predict with great accuracy (in some instances with 90% accuracy) when a professional player is about to serve a double fault in a match. This is amazing considering the fact, in tennis, at the professional level, double faults are very rare (during the course of a professional match, out of over 100 serves, it is rare to see more than 5 to 10 double faults served by a player). The author, however also shares with the reader several other instances of how first impressions could be misleading and may not be always necessarily accurate by giving an example of how Warren Harding came about becoming the President of United States with his ability to make good first impressions.

Well I am sure by now you are thinking what Blink has got to do with Element/Network Management System. Plenty. Let me explain why. Even if we disagree with the author that first impressions made by people may not be necessarily correct, you can’t deny the fact that first impressions are very powerful and in sales/business first impressions are very critical. Better the first impression better the chance of attaining a favorable position in the mind of your prospect/customer. In fact this book basically reaffirms what mother used to always say when she wanted us to look presentable at the dinner table when guests are going to be present: “First impression is always the best impression” – Like it or not!

I believe one of the key areas of responsibility for the management system is to make that first best impression. I do agree that a management system has a host of responsibilities to fulfill such as exposing the features of the device, making it easy for the user interact with the device, be able to handle new generations of the device as well and scale to handle thousands if not millions of devices. Regardless of other requirements, I believe management application’s key responsibility should be to make that first impression of being easy to use and intuitive so that it gives the user a positive first impression. This positive first impression does set the tone of the interaction and ends up going a long way in giving an edge during the entire sales cycle (all other things being equal).

To sum up, in my opinion if the management system doesn’t do the job of making that best first impression for the device on the prospect’s mind then the management system has not done its most important job and has fallen considerably short of its objective. Therefore next time you are out shopping for a management application or planning to develop one in house, don’t forget that you may never get a second chance to make that first impression!

Dhyan Infotech Inc is a software and services company that helps Equipment Vendors differentiate their products in the market place. Dhyan's EMS technology, DNMS (Dhyan  Network/Element  Management System), is a component based Element Management System, which has been widely deployed by Dhyan's customers at many Service Providers both small and large

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If the traffic analysis is to be done external to the switch, very large amounts of flow statistic data has to be transmitted to the management server to enable the reporting process. Therefore the protocol that is being used to transmit the data plays a key role in differentiating a good solution from a mediocre one. Most management protocols such as SNMP, TL1, XML over HTTP etc., will prove very costly for this task as the overhead associated with these protocols is very high. For this purpose, Cisco Systems came up with the NetFlow protocol. The traditional Cisco definition is to use a 7-tuple key, where a flow is defined as a unidirectional sequence of packets all sharing all of the following 7 values:

NetFlow protocol went through few revisions (v1, v5, v6, v7, v8 and v9) and later IETF came up with the IPFIX protocol (based on NetFlow version 9) as a universal standard.

IPFIX protocol has a template based support to help vendors create custom templates with the provision to include additional flow specific details. Since IPFIX has a very low overhead it became very effective in notifying the management system about each flow passing through the switch.

When there are multiple flows flowing through a port, it is also possible to combine multiple flow information into a single IPFIX notification thereby sharing the overhead across multiple flows and reducing the overall network usage.

For further details on IPFIX/NetFlow protocols refer to the following URLs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Flow_Information_Export
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflow

It is extremely critical to identify the right protocol to be used in notifying network flows. Choosing a wrong protocol will severely impact the scalability of the system irrespective of how well the system has been designed.