This book on remote monitoring of network patterns fulfills its twofold purpose: to provide valuable information about RMON technology to network implementors and administrators, and to provide practical application examples that may help solve networking problems. Thus the book is written in three parts: the first, especially designed for students learning about network management, briefly describes the nature of RMON technology in terms of its benefits, so that users can determine whether it can be used in their networks. The second part goes into the details of RMON. It explains what each feature is, including the roles of statistics groups, alarm groups, filter groups, and history groups, and how they are used. The third part shows how RMON can be applied to solving problems. Several examples show RMON in action. The first four chapters provide the basics and do not assume that the reader is already an expert at networking. The rest of the book details what to make of networking monitoring and management.

Various aspects of the book are meant to provide the questions and answers that network managers are concerned with, such as Who is using the network? What protocols are being used? How do you optimize the topology of your network and place your servers in optimal locations in your network? and What do you do with duplicate use of IP addresses? This material helps in capacity planning. It also helps determine applications on a server.

Just like the other computer network books written by Perkins alone or with co-authors, this book is easy to read and use. It is also quite effective, because it lives up to the author’s credo of seeing to it that learning technology is not as important as applying it. For him, the creators and proponents of technology bear the burden of communicating its concepts and applications so that its users can obtain the maximum benefit from it. He seems to have succeeded in doing just that with this book.