Various experiences have shown that it is very important to provide the users of the network with some management information. It is efficient since the user (including an administrator from another network segment/domain) can quickly understand where a problem comes from and try to get in touch with the appropriate person or entity, instead of asking people that cannot help in solving a problem and wasting time unnecessarily.

For this use, tools to provide management information have to be chosen and a relevant subset of the information should be selected. To this end, in the 6NET project a set of looking glasses, weather maps etc., were implemented. They allowed any user to understand with a simple click how the network performed and in case of problems in what part of the network the problem occurred. Obviously these facilities are not restricted to large networks, but can be applied to any LAN with real benefits. The only thing that changes in this case is the nature of management information the users can obtain.