FCAPS

What is FCAPS?

It is an old term to better understanding how to monitor our network. And it is part of ISO Telecommunication Management Network. It’s stand for Fault, Configuration, Administration/Accounting, Performance and Security Management.

Each of the sub term has the following function:

Fault Management:

  1. detect problem
  2. isolate the problem
  3. log the problem
  4. notify the users
  5. recovery (if possible)

Configuration Management:

  1. to gather and store configurations
  2. to simplify the configuration of the device
  3. to track changes which are made to the configuration
  4. to configure/provision

Administration/Accounting Management

It is related to billing. It will collect cpu, memory, disk space usage and other resource used by the user. The example of this application is Radius and Diameter

Performance Management

  1. to address network throughput
  2. to address network percentage utilization
  3. to address network errors rate
  4. to address network response time

Performance Management enable us to adress the future needs in our network. Also it is important to know if our network meet with the Service Level Agreement we made with our customer. It is heavily rely on SNMP protocol or WMI for Windows server.

Securiy Management

It is the process to control user access to the network resources. The methods used are:

  1. Authentication
  2. Authorization
  3. Encription

Reference:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fcaps
- http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk869/tk769/technologies_white_paper09186a00800aea9c.shtml