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Cartographer or Building a Next Generation Management Framework. Bobby Krupczak Chief Scientist Krupczak.org, LLC rdk@krupczak.org http://www.krupczak.org/cartographer. Overview . Background Overview of network mgmt today Cartographer Yet another management framework
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Cartographer orBuilding a Next Generation Management Framework Bobby Krupczak Chief Scientist Krupczak.org, LLC rdk@krupczak.org http://www.krupczak.org/cartographer
Overview Background Overview of network mgmt today Cartographer Yet another management framework Software technology Demo
Who Am I? BS CISE from UF 1989 Worked in industry on SNMP MS CS GaTech 1993 Co-founder of Empire Technologies PhD CS GaTech 1997 Sold Empire to Concord 1999 Krupczak.org 2003
Management Model Mgmt info is virtual representation Managers, agents exchange mgmt info Mgmt is therefore: Inspection of Alteration of Creation of Deletion of mgmt info
First-Generation Dumb, lightweight (hopefully) agents Heavyweight, complex, smart managers Traditional command-control Scaling becomes issue Analogous to CEO managing entire enterprise
2nd-Generation Push intelligence outwards towards agent Empire/SystemEDGE, RMON Increase scaling, reduce reaction time Some delegation, middle-managers, remote pollers Exception-management, event de-duplication, root-cause
2nd-Generation (continued) Agents still work in isolation (stovepipes) Distribution overhead and agent administrative footprint still non-trivial SNMPv1, v2c, v3 now deployed Agent backlash? CEO now has bank VPs but still manage/controls the enterprise
Cartographer Discover, track relationships between components in distributed system Dependencies between network, system, applications Include network services as well as higher-layer abstractions Agent based Topography not topology Others have examined this approach though mostly in academic research papers
Cartographer (II) Model relationships using dependency graph borrowed from graph theory branch of mathematics Systems represented as vertexes Dependencies represented as edges Directed graphs System is server if it provides service to some client System is client if it consumes service
What Do We Do With Data? Discover, analyze dependencies Diagnose and troubleshoot faults Security spinoff Monitor, test, & compare service experiences Work bottom-up
But I Already Know My Network You may be surprised what you find Distributed systems are highly dynamic, not static Automating management necessitates capturing this info and encoding it
What Do We Do? Discover/Analyze Discover dependencies via: OS and app configuration /etc, .ini, and Windows registry System APIs Dynamically via protocol endpoints IPv4 and IPv6 Classify into ~ 30 different types Inbound/outbound/transit Per-system, per-user, per-app
What We Do? Discover/Analyze (II) Dependencies tell us what a machine is doing Validate configuration and operation Discover misconfiguration Seed automatic configuration for monitoring If DB server => automatically monitor components
What Do We Do? Diagnose Who/what is impacted? If key app dies => know who is impacted Determine root cause/impact Given fault, which clients are affected? Given a client, what faults are affecting it? We know service A depends on X,Y,Z If A fails, examine X, Y, Z
What Do We Do? Security Spinoff Track dependencies and interactions longterm Develop model of typical behavior/role of system/app Deviations from baseline could indicate issues Social networking for computers If my machine starts communicating with those in China . . . .
What Do We Do? Compare Service Experience Do you see what I see? Use dependency data to automatically test services Global, centralized testing Per-system active testing Per-system passive monitoring Detect localized hot-spots Pinpoint infrastructure problems
What Is Next Generation About This? Started with observations about how human corporations work CEO sets broad policies and goals Employees implement them, solve problems, run the show Managers and agents become peers Further push intelligence and command/control downward and outward P2P architecture utilized Every agent acts in dual role
Peer-to-Peer Not based on polling and storing of data in central repository Not to say this isn't important Agents self-organize into p2p overlay networks Exchange information with peers Run distributed algorithms Self-propagate, self-update
What Is A Peer? Systems are peers if they both utilize same service from same server Many p2p overlays Increase scaling (unlimited?) Reduce reaction time Analyze more up-to-date info
New Management Framework? Why re-invent the wheel? Could make existing IMF work given enough tape and glue SNMPvX still too cumbersome, inefficient Protocol limitations ASN.1/BER too brittle and prone to interoperability problems WBEM/CIM too heavyweight, complex Spend all day modeling, not managing Some existing work applying XML to IMF
XML Management Protocol Framework in addition to just a protocol SMI, protocol, MIBs Borrow from and extend the IMF as much as possible Utilize XML for: Data modeling (SMI) Specification (MIBs) Transfer syntax (protocol) Everything is text
More XML ASN.1 could have been used? More XML tools, More widely adopted than ASN.1 XML schemas for structured document Modeling Parsing Conversion Validating Still need to test interoperability
XMP SMI http://xmlns.krupczak.org/xsd/xmptypes-1.0.xsd Start with SNMP SMI Enhance only where necessary Do away with OIDs Tuple of MIB-name, object-name, key MIB-2 ifInOctets From: 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.10.1 To: mib2.ifInOctets.if0
XMP SMI (II) SMI type enhancements Added several data types and promoted several textual conventions Everything 64-bit min, although with XML, numbers can be larger w/o breaking 2/3 of framework With BER, changing from 32-64 bit breaks SMIs, MIBs, software Textual conventions specify additional semantics; overloading is poor engineering Promote several to standard types
XMP SMI (III) Added extendedBoolean type True, False, Unknown Added unsupportedVariable so agent can answer queries honestly and completely Avoid use of inheritance and poloymorphism complexities (ala CIM) Scalar and tabular objects
XMP SMI (IV) Tables are relations Support relational table operations How to marry table permissions with object permissions? Need a lot more work on MIB specification & schema
XMP Protocol http://xmlns.krupczak.org/xsd/xmp-1.0.xsd
XMP Protocol (II) Connection-oriented Avoid much of intricacies of UDP-based protocols What intricacies? More efficient for larger data xfers No need for MIB tricks No need for object ordering No built-in race conditions in large tables Original rationale for SNMP/UDP valid then, not now?
XMP Protocol (III) Entity initiates session Also closes session Stay connected as long as needed RPC like semantics Request/response semantics Initiator makes requests Is this a manager?
XMP Protocol (IV) Message types borrowed from SNMP GetRequest (scalars) Response (scalars, tables) SetRequest (scalars) Trap First two objects are core.trapType and core.sysObjectID Information
XMP Table Operations SQL-like SelectTableRequest InsertTableRequest DeleteTableRequest UpdateTableRequest No overloading, no side-effects
No GetNext/GetBulk No GetNext/GetBulk needed for table traversal GetNext yields very little information and no additional semantics But how do I walk a MIB? You don't In practice, walking only yields syntactic information
Tables, Keys For scalars, no real instance identifier needed For tables, relation keys Keys can be strings, numbers, variable-length No explicit notion of ordering No need?
XMP Encapsulation in SSL/TCP Utilize SSLv3/TLSv1 for privacy and authentication Cartographer utilizes its own CA to create/sign X509v3 certs Each entity embeds own CA Agent -> Agent requires two-way authentication Manager does not need to provide cert TCP/UDP 5270
XMP MIBs Virtually compatible with SNMP SMI Implemented MIB-2 in XMP Can implement others HostMIB, SysApplMIB How MIBs are specified still under development XML schema Tables, objects, keys Borrow from relational DB theory and SQL
XMP MIBs (II) MIB names must be unique within universe of XMP Within a MIB, object names must be unique Can utilize private-enterprise numbers to help with uniqueness Krupczak.org is 16050 Core MIB contains agent-engine stats and config Cartographer MIB implemented
But How Do I Make Money? License model: Open source Closed source Dual-license Traditional closed-source company Market for management software mature and consolidating Unlikely to gain much traction Crippleware
Example OSS Companies Example open-source companies: Sendmail (OSS, add-on software and services) Snort (dual license?) Asterisk (dual license) OpenNMS (OSS, services) JBoss – sold for $400m to RedHat MySQL – sold for $1B to Sun
An Island or Ecosystem? Tremendous investment in existing products & frameworks Add XMP as new management protocol to existing platforms OpenNMS MRTG ZenOSS? Integration in research phase Others?
Integration (continued) SNMP/XMP gateway? Not under active consideration Very difficult computer science problem Backport to SNMP, WBEM Not under active consideration More likely than gateway approach
Technologies, Platforms, Engines Agent written entirely in C No need to install interpreters, VMs, DLLs In past lifetime, having to install Java on all systems was large barrier Goal is to run agent out of box Very small footprint Footprint less than 3% is upper-bound Engine is 66k lines of C-code Plugins 9k to 16k lines of C-code Ship with libs/DLLs if needed
Platform support Solaris 9+ Sparc (64-bit) Solaris 9+ x86 Linux 2.4+ on x86 (32, 64-bit) Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008 Win32 and Win64 Agent uses as few libs as possible Libxml Pthreads Openssl Iconv, zlib
Licenses Agent engine, GPLv2 MIB-2 plugin, GPLv2 Example plugin, GPLv2 Cartographer plugin, closed source, shrinkwrap software license Java GUI, closed source, shrinkwrap software license See release notes and install instructions