Network Management helps network system administrators manage a network, from ensuring that the network is protected from unauthorized users, eliminating any hold ups in the network to ensure performance and making sure the network is reliable available to users and responding to hardware and software malfunctions. As more companies realize the importance of network management, the more news we see every day. Here are the top stories this week in the network management space.

Metanoia, Inc. recently staged a panel on issues of performance management and network monitoring as they relate to service provider networks. According to reports, the panel was a rousing success, as the Mountain View company provided plenty of insight for those looking for ways to improve the capabilities of its networks. The panel, part of a larger initiative around what they called "Provider Network Health Assessment", focused on, in the words of Metanoia, Inc. principal Dr. Vishal Sharma, "...technology and business strategy issues of contemporary importance for service providers globally." 

Provider of SaaS (News - Alert)-based cloud application performance management, New Relic recently partnered with Wirehive, a specialist hosting and infrastructure services company, allowing Wirehive customers to receive New Relic Standard for free. New Relic Standard offers application-level performance monitoring, allowing for the creation of high-performance, scalable apps. Wirehive customers now have immediate, completely free access to a powerful tool for monitoring, troubleshooting and tuning applications.

Zoho (News - Alert) Corporation offers a new update to its WebNMS SNMP API that's specifically geared toward Android (News - Alert) users, and this brings a whole new array of functions to those who need to engage in network management activities, especially when they're not on premises. SNMP—Simple Network Management Protocol—is the standard protocol for managing devices like switches, servers, workstations, printers and more via an IP network. Since it allows for a variety of devices to be managed, it offers up plenty of potential in terms of remote management, which is augmented by the Android-based offering that WebNMS is bringing into play. WebNMS SNMP offers a Java library to handle much of its SNMP-based management applications, which dovetails nicely into the portability offered by the Android platform.

In related news this week, Zoho Corporation also offers the next generation of economical and easy-to-use system and cloud integration through REST API. Representational State Transfer (REST) is software architecture used for the Web. ManageEngine’s (News - Alert) Applications Manager provides REST APIs for getting data from Applications Manager. Using these APIs, Applications Manager’s data can be integrated with any internal portal or third party system management software. These APIs also make it easy to integrate Applications Manager with internal portals and other monitoring tools. Also, the data can be inserted in a database or put into any format.

Stay tuned each week to the network management community for the latest industry trends, announcements, news and resources.