Managing users, applications and resources with RMON2

The increasing growth of the amount and complexity of applications and protocols executed on computer networks has hindered the work of their administrators. They need to justify the ever-increasing investments accomplished on network equipment acquisition and on communication links leasing. For such, they must: identify who, and with which purpose, most consumes these resources, know if users and resources are located so that the presence of bottlenecks in the network is minimized and detect if some intruder, by means of a high-layer protocol is trying to invade it. An appropriate and current solution capable to answer these subjects is the use of RMON2, an MIB that operates above the link layer, providing information needed to monitor client-server applications and end-to-end communications. This work presents the results of a study accomplished on this MIB, aiming at extracting from it means to control the users´ activities, to monitor protocols and applications, to optimize the localization of users and resources and to accomplish security management