Management Considerations Sharon Chisholm

Outline Problem Statement Relevant Inputs Content of a Management Considerations document Format of a Management Considerations document

Problem Statement Looking at better ways to develop and review SNMP MIBs Not enough consideration given to management considerations during protocol development Mapping to protocols other then SNMP

Relevant Inputs draft-farrel-rtg-manageability-requirements-01.txt  defines requirements for the inclusion of Manageablity Considerations sections in all Internet- Drafts produced within the Routing Area  Mandatory Topics Control of Function and Policy Information and Data Models, e.g. MIB module Liveness Detection and Monitoring Verifying Correct Operation Requirements on Other Protocols and Functional Components Impact on Network Operation

Relevant Inputs MIB Doctor IETF 65  idea that instead of getting non-experts to write MIBs and then put lots of resources in reviewing them, it could make more sense to have working groups document knobs and buttons required to management their technology and have the experts write the MIBs General industry trend towards defining management information in a format that can then be mapped into flavour of the month protocol solutions.

Content of a Management Considerations Document Example use cases  How to tell if things are running well/badly  How to set-up  How to modify  (Section 3 of the Farrel drafts has some interesting input here) Understanding of information to be manipulated  List of things that need to be configured  List of status that should be reported and/or changeable  List of statistics that should be reported  Understanding of how this relates to other parts of the system  Definition of uniqueness (hint for index/keys) What else?

Format for Management Considerations Document Management Protocol-neutral Plain text, instead of trying to figure out how to encode UML in ASCII Data items can provide numeric and mnemonic values and data type suggestions, but it should be acceptable to map these into something more appropriate for a particular protocol. Well-written textual descriptions of the data items Similar to what is in Farrel, section X.2, but a bit more detailed.

Discussion Points Section within a technology specification or separate document?  Inline makes protocol designers think  Will the document become too large? Does the management area still review this section like we did with MIBs?  Will this sort of review be easier?

Backup

Current Method of working Technology Working Group New Technology New Technology MIB Management Area Expert Review to ensure correct syntax, etc Publish SNMP MIB RFC Proprietary CLI Other Protocols

Proposed Method of Working Technology Working Group New Technology Management Considerations Publish XSD RFC Proprietary CLI Other Protocols Management Area New Technology MIB New Technology XSD Publish SNMP MIB RFC