Network domains

Before installing, you need to consider whether to partition your network into domains, or have a single domain for the entire network. A network domain is a collection of network entities to be discovered and managed.

Restriction: Use only alphanumeric characters and underscores (_) for domain names. Any other characters, for example hyphens (-), are not permitted.

Reasons for partitioning your network into multiple domains

Partitioning your network into domains allows you to discover your network in sections. Reasons for partitioning your network include:

  • Scalability: Your network might be too big to be discovered in one piece.
  • Geography: You might want to break the network into geographical regions, and make each region correspond to a domain.
  • Logical network boundaries: You might want to discover and manage the network based on particular network boundaries.

Discovered domains can be monitored separately.

You can run multiple domains in order to perform multiple network discoveries, and multiple Network Manager processes can run independently of each other on the same server if they belong to different domains.

Identifying the domain of an event

Identifying the domain of an event enables the Network Views and Hop view to generate the correct topology map for that event.

The domain in which an event originates can be identified in the following ways:

  • By using one domain per ObjectServer and using the name of the ObjectServer to identify the domain from which the event originates.
  • If using multiple domains per ObjectServer, probes in each domain need to be configured to enable the event itself to hold information that identifies the domain. This approach enables multiple Network Manager domains to be connected to a single ObjectServer.