The International Standards Organization (ISO) created a committee to produce a model for network management, under the direction of the OSI group.

This model has four parts:

• Organization
• Information
• Communication
• Functional

This is a view of network management from the top-down, divided into four submodels and recognized by the OSI standard.

The Organization model describes the components of network management such as a manager, agent, and so on, and their relationships. The arrangement of these components leads to different types of architecture, which will be discussed later.

The Information model is concerned with structure and storage of network management information. This information is stored in a database, called a management information base (MIB). The ISO defined the structure of management information (SMI) to define the syntax and semantics of management information stored in the MIB. MIBs and SMI will be covered in more depth later.

The Communication model deals with how the management data is communicated between the agent and manager process. It is concerned with the transport protocol, the application protocol, and commands and responses between peers.

The Functional model addresses the network management applications that reside upon the network management station (NMS). The OSI network management model categorizes five areas of function, sometimes referred to as the FCAPS model:

• Fault
• Configuration
• Accounting
• Performance
• Security

This network management model has gained broad acceptance by vendors as a useful way of describing the requirements for any network management system.