5.2.2 Communication configuration regions
Regions represent areas of the network where similar communication settings make sense. For example, the local network around the NNMi management server usually returns responses very quickly. Areas of your network that are multiple hops away typically take longer to respond.
You do not need to configure each subnet or area of your network. You can combine areas into one region based on similar lag times. Consider the following network map:
![[Figure]](GRAPHICS/F0000035.GIF)
For timeout and retry purposes, you might want to configure the following regions:
Region A for Net 1
Region B to include Net 10, Net 20, and Net 30
Region C for the more distant outlying networks
You would decide how best to group Net 170, depending on whether traffic management configuration is set to prefer the one-hop path or the two-hop path from the NNMi management server.
Regions are also used to group devices with similar access credentials. If all routers in your network use the same community string (or a small set of possible community strings) and you can identify the routers with a naming convention (for example, rtrnnn.yourdomain.com), you can configure a region containing all routers so that they are handled similarly. If you cannot use a wildcard to group the devices, you can configure each as a specific node.
Plan your region configurations so that you can apply the same timeout and retry values and access credential configurations to all nodes in a region.
Region definitions can overlap, and a device might qualify for multiple regions. NNMi applies the settings from the region with the lowest ordering number (and no other matching regions).