OpenView Network Node Manager: Designing and Implementing an Enterprise Solution

Why DNS Is So Important to NNM

NNM discovers devices via the IP address found in ARP caches, seed files, routing tables, and ICMP echoes. In IP networks, devices are given names, and in large networks this name space is divided into a hierarchy of subdomains. This eliminates name collisions on large networks where there is a high degree of configuration checking done, generating a high rate of DNS forward and reverse lookups. This lookup mechanism can be a performance bottleneck.

A common problem is NNM combining two routers into a single node. This is usually caused by bad DNS data.

DNS is an efficient mechanism for looking up IP addresses and names because it was designed for that purpose. Caching is one of the mechanisms DNS servers use to ...