It's been said that numbers are like people: Torture them enough and they'll tell you anything. Many network-management products seem to have taken this adage to heart: They display pretty graphs and tables that purport to show what is happening now in your network and even predict what will happen in the future. At first glance, the statistics generated appear authoritative and helpful, a clear view into the chaos that is a large, heterogeneous network.

Take a closer look. After in-depth scrutiny, you may find that those spiffy statistics don't make sense. This is not necessarily because of incorrect calculations by the application's MIB expressions generating the statistics, and it's certainly not an indication of a lack of understanding of network management on your part! Rather, often the case is that what you see is not what the application thinks it's showing you.

That's unacceptable. Network-management applications need to include in their GUIs, reports and documentation clear and concise definitions of the statistics they gather and present. If you look at a statistic on a report and can't figure it out -- or worse yet, your users misinterpret a report -- you're hosed. Expect clear definitions; never assume that you don't understand a chart. In most cases, it just needs to be explained clearly. Do your part to stop the torture of statistics -- and network managers -- by letting the vendor of your network-management framework know when you find shortcomings in report presentation capabilities.