Overview of Network and Service Management

Network and service management includes all the operations that involve the setup, configuration, administration, and management of a network and of the services running on the top of it. Fault management, routing optimization, network provisioning, Quality of Service (QoS) management, etc. are all operations that fall below the activities of network and service management. The overarching function is to ensure that network resources are effectively made available to customers and consumed as efficiently as possible by applications. Several technologies enable network management operations, from traditional protocols like Simple Network Management Protocol and Command Line Interfaces, to more recent Software Defined Networks and Network Functions Virtualization. In this chapter, we give the reader and overview of such technologies, describing the protocols and the solutions, while leaving the algorithmic details for later.