Network monitoring system for network equipment availability and performance reporting

The culmination of the digital world has been the need for computer networks increasing daily, because they enable communication between two or more connected peripheral devices and sharing of resources. However, the increasing demand of computer networks may be chaotic and a bit challenging at times, and that can affect the rate of performance of the network. When such chaotic events occur on the network they might make it slow, cause a network and unreachable and also be exposed to lot of vulnerabilities. Over the years network specialists have been working on finding ways of reducing such events and one of such ways was the development of Network Monitoring Systems (NMS). A NMS can be defined as a computer network's systematic effort to detect slow, such as failing routers, switches and any other network devices. They were developed as means of improving the process of manually checking for faults on the network, it does this by frequently providing adequate information that the network administrators can use to analyze, monitor, troubleshoot and configure network devices. This paper presents a prototype implementation of Network Equipment Availability and Performance Reporting at the University of Fort Hare. Campus area network was used as the testing platform.