Re: [sip-clf] Defining Pros and Cons of ASCII/IPFIX

[Hadriel Kaplan <[e-mail]>]

On Nov 7, 2010, at 5:53 PM, Cullen Jennings wrote:

> Here's the conversation I imagine having with the product marketing people that will decide if this gets prioritized high enough that we will actually implement it. Hey I need X people for Solution A and that will give customers the benefit of BLAH BLAH. Then I say, I also want on the Y people for Solution B and that will give customers the benefit of and repeat the same BLAH BLAH. At that point they will say, so if we did just one of these they would get all the benefit right? and I will say yes and that will be the end of it - they will either decide I am so stupid  to even propose this that they do neither or, if I am lucky,  they will pick one based on some complete misunderstanding. I'll get back we choose A because that solution better aligns with the RESTful architecture of cloud computing. 

Right, so this basically gets to the heart of it in my opinion.  And my guess is you'll actually end up doing both.  Why?  Because the ipfix one is Netflow v10, and Cisco likes Netflow - both the marketing people like it, and there are tools for it.  It's not as popular as Netflow v9 of course, but it'll get there eventually.  So think of it this way: Cisco makes routers and switches (or so I've heard ;) and those boxes export various Netflow versions today.  Don't you think your marketing people would want to position a "unified monitoring" approach whereby the Netflow records exported by the routers/switches can be collected and correlated to the ones from your Call Managers/Cube and such, to provide not only correlation of signaling flows but also media?  I think they would.  That looks really good in PowerPoint and Data Sheets. :)

But then they'd also want to log it in ascii format, for those customers that don't have Netflow tools or for simple lab testing type use.

This isn't much different than what vendors have to do for CDRs right now - afaict a lot of us record them in multiple formats, both binary like RADIUS or DIAMETER, as well as ascii like CSV format.  Different customers use different formats, and they have different pros/cons, but we're willing to implement multiple formats because we want to provide the info to everyone/anyone.  

I think the same thing will happen here - as a vendor, it's in your own interest to provide as many tools to troubleshoot and monitor SIP as you can, for as many customers as possible.

-hadriel