HOW TO MANAGE CISCO ROUTERS AND SWITCHES

Hi everybody i had taken long without engaging in the forum and i think i have missed a lot.Anyway i was busy perparing for my CCNA certification and i successfully passed the exam 640-801.
Now my new nightmare is i have got a job with academy where i have been studying from my CCNA and CCNP,and i happen to be now a CISCO ROUTER AND SWITCHES ASSET MANAGER and it's a wonderful job coz i love the whole stuff.

MY PROBLEM HOWEVER IS HOW I AM GOING TO MANAGE THIS DEVICES .I HAVE GOT ENOUGH KNOWLEDGE AS FAR AS ROUTERS AND SWICHES ARE CONCERNED BUT I FEEL I NEED MORE HINTS AND ADVICE FROM YOU GUYS ON HOW I SHOULD MANAGE THIS DEVISES FOR THE BETTER PERFORMANCE.
HINT ON MANAGING AND UPGRADING CISCO ROUTER AND SWITSHES IS ALL I NEED PLEASE.

Hi

Congratulations for your new job & also for the wonderful job profile...

With regards to the performance, to give you the best of ours it would be great if you could tell us about the network spec and the layout you have .

With regards to monitoring, you can either go for a NMS or develop a Monitoring tool of your own using PERL, MySQL & PHP..

With regards to maintanance, as usual please keep a track of the router and switch IOS with cisco and also take backup of the working configuration in frequent interval with a note on the IOS version.

Thanks
Paul