Re: [Idr] [GROW] draft-snijders-idr-shutdown-00: Drop a line in the peer's syslog at shutdown

[Job Snijders <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 05:23:15PM +0000, Neil J. McRae wrote:
> It's a wonderfully useless solution when it could be a wonderfully
> useful solution - it's just more  operational noise that we already
> have and we will start filtering like everything else. 

What's really useless is hyperbole argumentation. :-) Don't forget to
recognise that your network operations might differ from how other
people operate their network.

A common pattern:

    supplier: "2 weeks from now at 18:00 UTC we will do maintenance XYZ on router ABC, this work is tracked in V-NOC-24789244"
    *two weeks pass*
    *supplier starts the work*
    *customer sees BGP session with router ABC go down*
    customer calls supplier's NOC: "hey my session is down, whats up!?"

If in the above scenario the customer had seen "V-NOC-24789244 maintenace started" in their syslog (where they started their
investigation), the customer would search for the V-NOC-24789244 string
in their mailbox and all details would become clear. I think this is
useful and a good starting point.

I suspect that where Neil is coming from, the customer would have
already parsed the maintenance notification 2 weeks before the
maintenance work, and added that to their organisational-wide calendar,
pre-silenced alerts, drained the traffic away, etc.

The "shutdown" draft is not a replacement for efforts such as
https://www.maintenancemanager.org/ - but maybe, when "shutdown" is more
ubiquitously available, it could be a component in such maintenance
manager toolchains.

Maybe in 2 or 3 years time we'll revisit the topic and based on that
operational experience define a taxonomy and create a structured
approach. Maybe the structured approach will be entirely out-of-band
(companies posting yang to each others' maintenance API endpoints?).  I
think the free form approach is an excellent starting point to see (and
immediately benefit) how a tool like this is used in the wild.

Kind regards,

Job