Network Administration Visualized can be divided into two parts: A set of back-end processes and a web-based user interface. The back-end processes are responsible for collecting and analyzing data from your monitored equipment and for performing various background maintenance and administrative tasks. The web-based user interface's main task is to present the collected and analyzed information to the network administrators and other users, and also to allow the administrators to perform administrative tasks such as editing the list of monitored equipment, control other users' access to the web interface, set up maintenance tasks, post operational messages and so forth.

Although you may distinguish between an administrator and a user, this document is about using NAV; the network administrator(s) will usually also be the NAV administrator(s), and so will also be a NAV user in this context.