Conventional network management is based on SNMP and often run in a centralized manner. Although the centralized management approach gives network administrators a flexibility of managing the whole network from a single place, it is prone to information bottleneck and excessive processing load at the manager and heavy usage of network bandwidth. For scalability, this paper presents a mobile agent based network management framework (MAN). Mobile agents for network management tend to monitor and control networked devices on site and consequently save the manager capacity and network bandwidth. The MAN architecture is a hybrid model. It provides an additional network management interface to administrators atop SNMP layer so that the administrator can have the flexibility of using a most appropriate management approach according to the network characteristic and nature of management activities. The MAN architecture has been prototyped based on an AdventNet SNMP package and an IBM Aglet mo...