Management Considerations

1. Management Considerations Sharon Chisholm schishol@nortel.com

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

3. 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

4. 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

5. Relevant Inputs • MIB Doctor Meeting @ 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.

6. 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?

7. 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.

8. 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?

9. Backup

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

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