3com WX3000 Manuel D’Utilisation

 

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Remote monitoring (RMON) is a kind of management information base (MIB) defined by Internet 

Engineering Task Force (IETF). It is an important enhancement made to MIB II standards. RMON is 

mainly used to monitor the data traffic across a network segment or even the entire network, and is 

currently a commonly used network management standard. 

An RMON system comprises of two parts: the network management station (NMS) and the agents 

running on network devices. RMON agents operate on network monitors or network probes to collect 

and keep track of the statistics of the traffic across the network segments to which their ports connect, 

such as the total number of the packets on a network segment in a specific period of time and the total 

number of packets successfully sent to a specific host. 

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RMON is fully based on SNMP architecture. It is compatible with the current SNMP 

implementations. 

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RMON enables SNMP to monitor remote network devices more effectively and actively, thus 

providing a satisfactory means of monitoring remote subnets.  

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With RMON implemented, the communication traffic between NMS and SNMP agents can be 

reduced, thus facilitating the management of large-scale internetworks. 

RMON allows multiple monitors. It can collect data in the following two ways: 

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Using the dedicated RMON probes. When an RMON system operates in this way, the NMS directly 

obtains management information from the RMON probes and controls the network resources. In 

this case, all information in the RMON MIB can be obtained. 

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Embedding RMON agents into network devices (such as routers, switches and hubs) directly to 

make the latter capable of RMON probe functions. When an RMON system operates in this way, 

the NMS collects network management information by exchanging information with the SNMP 

agents using the basic SNMP commands. However, this way depends on device resources heavily 

and an NMS operating in this way can only obtain the information about these four groups (instead 

of all the information in the RMON MIB): alarm group, event group, history group, and statistics 

group. 

The device implements RMON in the second way. With an RMON agent embedded in, the device can 

serve as a network device with the RMON probe function. Through the RMON-capable SNMP agents 

running on the device, an NMS can obtain the information about the total traffic, error statistics and 

performance statistics of the network segments to which the ports of the managed network devices are 

connected. Thus, the NMS can further manage the networks.