Subject: [ippm] IPPM MIB

From: "Henk Uijterwaal (RIPE NCC)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 10:43:18 +0200 (CEST)

IPPM group,

Since the IPPM WG meeting in Seoul, there have been several discussions
(both public and private) between Emile Stephan, Andy Bierman (the IPPM
MIB technical advisor), the chairs of the WG and several others, on how to
proceed with the IPPM MIB document (draft-ietf-ippm-reporting-mib-06.txt).
This mail summarizes the discussions and proposes a way forward.

We all agree that even though the current draft is in its 6th iteration,
there has been very little feedback from the WG on its contents.  The
chairs did receive some informal comments on the document, these can be
summarized as "the document and MIB are too complex".

A proposal has been made to for a simpler approach, based on a ring buffer
to store individual measurements.  While this looked nice in theory, in
practice it is probably not possible to store and retrieve individual
measurements in a MIB at a rate of the order of 1Hz or more. In other
words, a MIB can only be used to report aggregate information, where the
aggregation is done either on demand or by default at regular intervals.

As the next steps, we propose:

1. The mailing list will be asked to provide feedback on the question
   what information they would like to see in the management interface
   of a network measurement system. (See below).

2. When there is consensus on this question, we will look at existing
   MIB's (in particular the RMONMIB TPM-MIB) to see what is
   already there to satisfy the requirements generated in the previous
   step and what has to be defined in our group.

3. The existing document will be rewritten to define whatever has to be
   defined and nothing more.

If there is little or no feedback on step 1, we will conclude that there
is no interest in an IPPM at the moment.  In that case, the existing
document will be finished and a published as an informational RFC.

To start, the first questions we would like to see answered, are:

* What information would you like to see in a management interface of a
  measurement system?
* What action would you like to take with a management interface of a
  measurement system?
* Do you have requests from the users of your implementation of the
  IPPM metrics for an interface between the measurement system and
  a network management system (NMS)?

Please note the constraint mentioned above. It also should be noted that
some of the IPPM metrics implementations do not use a MIB but do report
aggregated information in other formats (CSV, XML, graphical, ...)  This
is information that could (potentially) be reported in a MIB as well.

We invite everybody to comment on both the procedure and the questions
above before September 30,

Henk

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Henk Uijterwaal                           Email: henk.uijterwaal(at)ripe.net
RIPE Network Coordination Centre          http://www.amsterdamned.org/~henk
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