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Chapter 10. 8260 RMON Support
This chapter is intended to provide an understanding of the Remote Network
Monitoring (RMON) concepts and to describe what facilities are provided by
RMON to help you manage your Ethernet and token-ring LANs. These concepts
are common to all RMON products though their implementation may differ.
10.1 RMON Overview
The concept of remote network monitoring (RMON) was conceived to meet the
requirements for truly distributed remote network management. In RMON, the
monitoring and management functions are assigned to intelligent probes
distributed throughout the network. These devices, called RMON probes or
RMON agents, monitor and collect traffic statistics on the network segment to
which they are attached.
RMON provides a view of the data-link layer of the 802.3/Ethernet and
802.5/token-ring networks. The data-link layer, as shown in Figure 115 is just
above the physical layer in the OSI stack and provides reliable delivery of data
across the underlying physical network.
Figure 115. OSI Stack
The RMON framework is currently defined for managing 802.3/Ethernet and
token-ring LAN environments. The FDDI extensions for RMON have yet to be
completed. RMON provides comprehensive Ethernet and token-ring LAN
network monitoring support functions such as statistics collection, threshold
monitoring, historical statistics collection, problem diagnostics and report
Copyright IBM Corp. 1995 191