[Fecframe] frameowrk ops and mgmt
"David Harrington" <ietfdbh@comcast.net> Tue, 14 June 2011 23:25 UTC
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From: David Harrington <ietfdbh@comcast.net>
To: draft-ietf-fecframe-framework@tools.ietf.org
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2011 19:25:42 -0400
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Subject: [Fecframe] frameowrk ops and mgmt
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Hi, I don't know why, but I never received the message sent by Vincent on 5/18. I am pretty satisfied with the latest rev. Vincent raised some questions. Here is my thinking on these, preceded by DBH> > 3) * syslog is standardized in RFC 5424, so we probably need to refer to this RFC, and similarly we need to refer to RFC 3411 for SNMP. Since implementing/using one of these protocols is RECOMMENDED, these references should go to the Normative References section (both are Standards Track documents, so there's no downward ref issue here). DBH> I think informative is fine. The recommendation is to use standard protocols, and syslog and snmp are just examples of standardized protocols. Having this recommendation increases the likelihood that implementers will choose one of these examples, increasing the likelihood of interoperability. * Is that sufficient to increase the probability that independent products interoperate? No, we need to go a bit further and define SNMP notification/syslog message formats. So the followup should be to start defining a MIB... Unless the implementer chooses an in-band, RTCP based, approach, which already includes useful information from the FECFRAME point of view. DBH> The WG has argued that the use cases are so varied that a single solution wouldn't work. You guys are the experts on this environment, so I need to accept that such is the case. But, I don't buy into the argument that ops and mgmt is out of scope as a result. Some environments can use in-band mechanisms such as RTCP; that's great. Some environments are better suited to out-of-band. Network management applications that work with syslog and/or snmp typically support proprietary data models as well as standard data models. So an operator can use their existing syslog and/or snmp tools to access provided feedback, even if the provided mib objects or syslog messages are proprietary. Would I rather see some standardization of the data models? sure, because that would be even better for operators. But if the environments really are that different, then it may not be possible to have one MIB module to represent them all. Maybe we need multiple MIB modules to support multiple use cases. At least with the recommendation of using standardized mgmt protocols, such as syslog or snmp, it is more likely that implementers will develop MIB modules and/or syslog messages that operators can access, rather than providing nothing. * We RECOMMEND two different out-of-band solutions, which creates interoperability risks. DBH> There are different types of interoperability. Management often has a different perspective on interoperability than lower-layer protocols. Operators use a variety of tools to monitor/manage their networks. Which tools they use depends on the task they are trying to perform (and what's available). An operator might use syslog to monitor logged information, maybe to determine the cause of a fault on a device. An operator might use SNMP to monitor their whole network, using an NMS with pretty colored icons of devices, etc., because SNMP is good for periodic polling of statistics (and testing reachability). SNMP can also be used as a troubleshooting tool, because it gives access to information (when provided) such as configuration parameters. It's a good state-query tool. SNMP notifications can be used to alert operators to significant events. Each of these tools can be useful to operators, but an operator can only use it if implementers support them in their implementations. As an operator, what I most care about is that the information is provided somehow so I can monitor the system and debug network problems using available tools - even if I have to write the tools. * As I understand, mappings exist between the syslog/SNMP solution: RFC 5675 explains how to map SNMP notifications to syslog messages, while RFC 5676 discusses the opposite mapping. I don't know if these mappings are common or not, but this may also increase the probability that different products interoperate. So we can perhaps add a third sentence: When required, a mapping mechanism between the syslog and SNMP reporting mechanisms COULD be used, as described in [RFC5675] and [RFC5676]. DBH> I'm OK with this text, even though I think it is unnecessary. Whether an implementation provides the information I need as a MIB or syslog messages or via a web server on the device is less important than having the information available somehow. Operators frequently use shell scripts to customize their management. It is certainly helpful if the access mechanism is standardized, such as syslog or snmp or http/html, since a variety of available tools support these standardized mechanisms. And many syslog or snmp tools have command-line versions available that work well with shell scripting. The ability to integrate with existing shell-scripted in-house tools and with other applications is where using standardized management **protocols** is really helpful to operators. * So the followup should be to start defining a MIB... DBH> A standardized data model for the information can certainly be helpful, so an operator can do direct comparison across devices to uncover anomalies. But different environments (including different vendor designs of devices, or different use cases) may demand different data models. Sometimes it takes experience with a new technology to understand the best way to model it and manage it. There are good reasons why many standard MIB modules never get implemented - often a proprietary model can better model the specific device or use case. It is common for NMS applications to model their network using databases, often based on an open source implementation like MySQL, or a commercial database like Oracle. Then they have a mapping table between OIDs and their database objects. They use SNMP to query the standard or proprietary MIB object by OID, extract the value, and then store the value in a field in their own database format, translating the type if necessary. It really doesn't matter to many NMS applications whether the MIB module is standard or proprietary as long as they know the vendor-specific OID to query for a particular piece of information, and how to massage the value to fit their database model. And operators can write scripts to massage the information from command line tools into the format they want. The benefit of standard data models to operators is they wouldn't necessarily need to write a script for each new device model if more devices used standard MIBs; the published documentation for standard MIBs tends to be better, more up-to-date, and more publicly available than those for proprietary MIBs; and more off-the-shelf applications already support the standard MIBs. (The same is true to varying degrees for syslog and other standard protocols, whether IETF or not.) David Harrington Director, IETF Transport Area ietfdbh@comcast.net (preferred for ietf) dbharrington@huaweisymantec.com +1 603 828 1401 (cell)
- [Fecframe] frameowrk ops and mgmt David Harrington