2.1.3 Application MIB (applmib)

NOTE: This charter is a snapshot of the 39th IETF Meeting in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. It may now be out-of-date.

Chair(s):

Jonathan Saperia <saperia@networks.bgs.com>
Cheryl Krupczak <cheryl@empiretech.com>

Applications Area Director(s):

Keith Moore <moore+iesg@cs.utk.edu>
Harald Alvestrand <Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no>

Applications Area Advisor:

Keith Moore <moore+iesg@cs.utk.edu>

Mailing Lists:

General Discussion: applmib@emi-summit.com
To Subscribe: applmib-request@emi-summit.com
Archive: ftp://ftp.emi-summit.com/applmib/applmib-archive

Description of Working Group:

The Application MIB Working Group is chartered to define a set of managed objects for the monitoring and control of distributed applications. Specifically, these managed objects will focus on providing information about the configuration (including application dependencies and associations between applications), fault (including status information such as up, down, or degraded) and performance (including resource utilization) of distributed applications.

The working group will only concern itself with the specification of MIB objects in the management areas defined above. It will not undertake to define details of implementation such as programming API's for the access to this information.

The working group will consider existing MIB modules that define objects with similar functions or modules which can be used in conjunction with the Application MIB such as RFC 1514 (The Host Resources MIB) and RFC 1697 (The RDBMS-MIB).

The activities of the working group will take place in two stages. The first will focus on the development of a System Application MIB that will not require applications to write additional instrumentation code. This generic information will serve as a base for the follow-on Application MIB that will contain additional information that will require applications to write additional instrumentation. The schedule below describes the schedule for the development of the System Application MIB.

Goals and Milestones:

Dec 95

  

Meet at Dallas IETF.

Jan 96

  

Post initial Internet-Draft of the Application Mib.

Feb 96

  

Post revised Internet-Draft.

Feb 96

  

Interim meeting to work on MIB.

Mar 96

  

Review Internet-Draft at LA IETF.

May 96

  

Post revised Internet-Draft.

Jun 96

  

Meet at Montreal IETF.

Jul 96

  

Issue final Internet-Draft.

Sep 96

  

Submit Internet-Draft to IESG for consideration as a Proposed Standard.

Internet-Drafts:

No Request For Comments

Current Meeting Report

Minutes of the Application MIB Working Group

Reported by: Jon Saperia

The Application MIB Working Group met on Monday to discuss the Application, and World Wide Web MIBs. The published agenda for the meeting was as follows:

General Meeting Agenda Topics

1. Mailing List and other administration.
2. Status of current work and review of schedule.

Agenda Items for the Application MIB

1. Summary of changes applied to draft since Memphis meeting.
2. Response Time/Transaction Objects.
3. Other open issues.
4. Last Call for any additions?
5. Schedule for Completion.

Agenda Items for the WWW MIB

1. Summary of changes applied to draft since Memphis meeting.
2. Discussion of proxy. Proposals to add attributes?
3. Error handling. Proposals for new attributes?
4. Document table. LastN. Relation to logging in applmib.
5. Last Call for any additions?
6. Schedule for Completion.

Meeting Summary

1. Action Items
2. Schedule of events
3. Close

To begin the meeting, Jon Saperia reviewed the status of the working group documents and charter updates. The System Application MIB had been awaiting Area Director action for some time and as of the meeting no information had been received about the status of our requests to move the document to Proposed Standard. The updated charter, though not posted on the IETF WEB page, was delivered to the Area Directors and mailed to the working group in April.

Our goal is to finish reviews of the Application MIB and WWW MIBs so that comments can be incorporated and new drafts issued early in September. This would mean that if consensus can be reached prior to the next IETF, the working group would not have to meet in Washington since we will have accomplished our current list of work items.

Summary of Changes Made to the Application MIB since the Memphis IETF:

1) Transaction statistics and Services tables have been added to the MIB. The statistics tables allow for data retrieval per transaction type per direction per transaction stream. The services tables allow for the connection of a service level view (such as that found in the WWW MIB) with the process level view found in the Application MIB.
2) References to the ARM work have been included (and will be refined) to reflect our attempt to align the new transaction statistics with the ARM work.
3) Additional information was added to discuss the issues associated with providing a collision-free mechanism for allocating service instance indexes.
4) Made index column information readable for easier mapping between service and application instances.

Refinements to be added for next draft to be published early at the end of the first week of September

1) Transaction tables will be modified so that information by service can also be retrieved.
2) Text to recommend that a convention for service name be based on RFC1700 when available.
3) Add applSvcInstQual to applSrvNameToSrvInstTable which will be a 'human readable' string.
4) Will fix applSrvName to remove URL specification.
5) Add text to say connection listeners are included in the applOpenConnectionTable.
6) Will add truncation algorithm to applOpenFileXrefTable and make clear this is for full path names and let people know that the other table in which the full path name, which will not be truncated, can be found. There was some discussion of the truncation approach and it was agreed that cutting from the right was best.
7) Section 4.1 needs an example service for clarity along with explanation of reasoning of what is and is not a service. Also, we will make clear that a person who implements this MIB can `define' his or her own service.

There were no additional proposals or outstanding requests for new objects at the end of the meeting so the next version of the document will be complete and it is anticipated ready for a working group last call.

Summary of Changes Made to the WWW MIB since the Memphis IETF

1) A large number of attributes that were not required have been removed or recombined.
2) There were significant changes to the Document Table and it has effectively been replaced. There will now be two 'buckets': one for last N Documents and another for top N. The Top N will be controlled by an object to set the size of the table.
3) Removed Application MIB extension tables which had no elements.
4) Wrote some minimal compliance statements (additional ones to be written).
5) A large number of editorial changes were also made.
6) There were no proposals for proxy elements posted to the mailing list or made at the meeting. None will be added.

Discussion:

1) A request had been posted to the mailing list for proposals for additional objects to support proxy. None were submitted and none were proposed at the meeting. No additional objects will be added for proxy.
2) Error handling objects were discussed and viewed as general issues not specific to the WWW MIB. Some of these issues are covered in the Application MIB. If there are any specific additions to be made, they should be posted to the list with specific objects by August 25. There was a request that the mailing list take up a discussion if there is interest in one or two objects to record the total number of failures and requests.
3) A second 'top n' table will be added to provide information about accesses and bytes served.
4) The default of 15 minutes will be used for the 'buckets' for the tables.
5) Sort order to be removed from control table since it is no longer needed because of the two top n tables.
6) There was some discussion about how to count multiple responses to a single request. Clarifications will be made in the document.
7) A desire was expressed for the addition of an attribute for a global count of transactions not completed. Carl and Juergen to look at this.
8) Response text needs clarification - Juergen will provide new text.
9) 64-bit counters like those found in the Application MIB will be added where appropriate and conformance wording added as necessary.

It is expected that the revised WWW MIB will be posted for review around the end of the first week of September.

Slides

None Received

Attendees List

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