2.4.13 Remote Network Monitoring (rmonmib)

NOTE: This charter is a snapshot of the 50th IETF Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It may now be out-of-date. Last Modified: 14-Mar-01

Chair(s):

Andy Bierman <abierman@cisco.com>

Operations and Management Area Director(s):

Randy Bush <randy@psg.com>
Bert Wijnen <bwijnen@lucent.com>

Operations and Management Area Advisor:

Bert Wijnen <bwijnen@lucent.com>

Technical Advisor(s):

Steven Waldbusser <waldbusser@nextbeacon.com>

Mailing Lists:

General Discussion:rmonmib@ietf.org
To Subscribe: http://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/rmonmib
Archive: www.ietf.org/mail-archive/working-groups/rmonmib/current/maillist.htm

Description of Working Group:

The RMON MIB Working Group is chartered to define a set of managed objects for remote monitoring of networks. These objects will be the minimum necessary to provide the ability to monitor multiple network layers of traffic in remote networks; providing fault, configuration, and performance management, and will be consistent with the SNMP framework and existing SNMP standards.

The following list of features for this RMON has been previously discussed in relation to existing RMON functionality and is included to focus these RMON activities. It is recognized that other issues may be considered and that certain of the following issues may not be part of the final specification(s):
1) Application Performance Measurement Monitoring support for the measurement and characterization of network application protocols, striving to measure an application user's experience as closely as possible. The RMON-2 MIB (RFC 2021) contains a protocol directory that will be used to identify applications for monitoring purposes.
While it is important to measure the performance of computing and network resources, these measurements don't give an insight to the actual service delivered to end-users. This end-user experience is best measured by the response-time and availability of application transactions because users interact directly with applications. This working group will create extensions to the RMON-2 MIB that will allow Application Performance Measurements to be retrieved with SNMP, no matter which technology is used to perform the measurements.
The goal of the working group is to provide a common framework and set of MIB objects, within the current RMON framework, for the identification and characterization of application responsiveness and availability, and the reporting of test results produced by such mechanisms. Common metrics and derived metrics will be characterized and reported in a manner consistent with the IP Performance Metrics Framework (RFC 2330).
It is an explicit non-goal of the working group to select one or more mechanisms as the preferred or standard RMON application performance measurement mechanism. However, it is possible that one or more standard mechanisms will be developed in the future, after significant implementation experience has been gained by the working group.
2) Differentiated Services Statistics Collection Monitoring support for Differentiated Services (DS) statistics collection, for the purpose of DS codepoint usage analysis and possibly other statistics related to DS deployment and performance tuning.
3) Interface TopN Reporting It is often too slow or difficult to determine the busiest ports in devices such as high port-density switches, using existing RMON mechanisms. New monitoring support is needed for quickly determining the most congested (highest utilized) physical ports and links in an RMON-capable device with multiple interfaces.
4) TR-RMON MIB Advancement The Token Ring RMON MIB (RFC 1513) is ready for standards track advancement. An interoperability and deployment survey has already been completed, but the MIB must be updated in SMIv2 format before it can be advanced on the standards track.

Goals and Milestones:

Done

  

Activation of working group, call for suggested MIB modules.

Done

  

Reach agreement on the functional scope of the charter, and finalize the document deliverables.

Done

  

Submit initial Internet-Draft for Differentiated Services Monitoring

Done

  

Submit initial Internet-Draft for Interface TopN Reporting

Done

  

Submit initial Internet-Draft for TR-RMON MIB in SMIv2 Format

Done

  

Begin Working Group Last Call for TR-RMON MIB in SMIv2 Format

Done

  

Submit initial Internet-Draft for Application Performance Metrics

Done

  

Begin Working Group Last Call for Differentiated Services Monitoring

Done

  

Begin Working Group Last Call for Interface TopN Reporting

Done

  

Submit Final Draft of Differentiated Services Monitoring to IESG for standards track action

Feb 01

  

Submit Final Draft of TR-RMON MIB in SMIv2 Format

Mar 01

  

Begin Working Group Last Call for Application Performance Metrics

Mar 01

  

Submit Final Draft of Application Performance Metrics to IESG for standards track action

Apr 01

  

Submit Final Draft of Interface TopN Reporting to IESG for standards track action

Internet-Drafts:
Request For Comments:

RFC

Status

Title

RFC2021

PS

Remote Network Monitoring Management Information Base Version 2 using SMIv2

RFC2613

PS

Remote Network Monitoring MIB Extensions for Switch Networks Version 1.0

RFC2819

S

Remote Network Monitoring Management Information Base

RFC2895

PS

Remote Network Monitoring MIB Protocol Identifier Reference

RFC2896

 

Remote Network Monitoring MIB Protocol Identifier Macros

Current Meeting Report

OPS Area
RMONMIB WG Meeting Minutes
IETF #50
March 19 & 22, 2001
Minutes by Andy Bierman and Chris Elliot

Review Material
---------------

(A) draft-ietf-rmonmib-apm-mib-03.txt
(B) draft-ietf-rmonmib-appverbs-01.txt
(C) draft-ietf-rmonmib-dsmon-mib-04.txt
(D) draft-ietf-rmonmib-hcrmon-08.txt
(E) draft-ietf-rmonmib-iftopn-mib-04.txt
(F) draft-ietf-rmonmib-tokenring-01.txt
(G) draft-ietf-rmonmib-tpm-mib-01.txt
(H) draft-kalbfleisch-sspmmib-01.txt

Agenda
------

I) Completion of drafts in WG Last Call
1) RMON MIB For High Capacity Networks (D)
2) Token Ring Extensions to the RMON MIB (F)
3) RMON Extensions for Differentiated Services (C)
4) RMON Extensions for Interface Parameters Monitoring (E)
II) Identify and resolve open issues in the PM drafts
5) Application Performance Measurement MIB (A)
6) Transport Performance Metrics MIB (G)
7) RMON Extensions for Identifying Application Protocol Verbs (B)
8) Definition of Managed Objects for Synthetic Sources for Performance Monitoring Algorithms. (H)

Minutes
-------

1) HC-RMON MIB

The final touches on the HC-RMON MIB are being completed, and the I-D was recently updated to reflect the decisions made by the WG regarding the publication of the 'HC versions' of the RMON (RFC 2819) and RMON2 (RFC 2021) modules.

Unfortunately, this draft was published with an old version number (should have been -08, was -06).

This draft is considered complete, and will be forwarded to the OPS Area Directors for RFC publication consideration as a Proposed Standard.

2) TR-RMON MIB

The Token Ring RMON MIB (RFC 1513) has been converted to SMIv2 format, as per the requirements for advancing a MIB in SMIv1 format. The recent version is considered complete, and has been forwarded to the OPS Area Directors for RFC publication consideration as a Draft Standard.

3) DSMON MIB

The recent WG Last Call for the DSMON MIB has raised the following issues:
- dsmonHostAddress range
The range added was (4 | 16 | 20) instead of (0..65535), which limits entries to valid IPv4 or IPv6 addresses.
The group discussed whether this restriction was needed, and decided it was not, so the range will be changed to (0..65535), and text that makes the MIB more independent of the protocol containing a DS field will be added.
- dsmonCodePoint TC
The group decided to remove this TC from the DSMON MIB and import the Dscp TC from the DS MIB instead, since that MIB was recently changed to provide a TC that matched the semantics of the DSMON version.
- editorial comments and corrections
Mailing list and A-D review comments will be added to the next version of the MIB
- addition of matrix and matrix-topN tables
This new feature was requested on the mailing list, and the justification for adding it to the MIB seems reasonable, so it will be added to the next version. Objections to adding this feature should be raised as soon as possible (even before the I-D is published and the WG Last Call starts, if possible).

This document will be subject to another WG Last Call when it is updated.

4) IF-TOPN MIB

The recent WG Last Call resulted in requests to add
2 features to this MIB:
- timestamp for completion of last report a new object in the TopN control table to record the completion time of the last valid report in associated TopN table, since the last start time is not sufficient in the event a report is ever restarted by an application. The group decided to add this object to the MIB.
- restructure TopN control table to configure multiple reports with one control entry, using a bitmask to identify the selected variables, instead of an enumeration to select one variable.
The group discussed the complexities of the proposal and decided not to make these changes.

A new version (-05) of this MIB, which includes the new timestamp and AD review comments, has already been published (thanks Dan!). Another WG Last Call will not be held since the changes are minor, and have already been discussed and approved on the mailing list.

The -05 version is considered complete, and will be forwarded to the OPS Area Directors for RFC publication consideration as a Proposed Standard.

5) APM MIB

The group discussed the latest version of this MIB, including mailing list comments made since the last IETF meeting. The next version will reflect some changes and corrections as a result.

The group discussed whether the apmHttpFilterTable should be expanded or replicated for other protocols, such as FTP, and decided against this proposal at this time. Specific HTTP monitoring issues were discussed:
- the MIB will mandate that the URL in the request is applied against the filter, not the URL in the associated replies, which may be remapped by the server.
- the 'capital WEB' protocol specification does not exist, which is an open issue. The group discussed how this meta-protocol could affect classification of packets for counting purposes, and decided that the PI entries are independent of one another, so the counters for the component protocols should be incremented, even if the 'WEB' counters are also incremented. The same issue applies to the user defined protocols (apmAppDirectoryTable). E.g., an NMS may define the 'acme.com/foo.html' URL to be a protocol, so the agent will increment the counters for 'http' in addition to the 'acme.com/foo.html' counters.
- The apmHttp404IsFailure object was discussed, and the group decided to change this object to cover all errors in the range 400 - 499. Additional scalars for other protocols will not be added at this time.
- Any request for content which results is the experience expected by the user is considered a successful transaction, even for cached pages or conditional refresh requests for already up-top-date pages.

The group also decided to add a scalar object to help an application determine the last time any of the bucket boundaries in any APM reports was changed by another application.

This document will be subject to another WG Last Call when it is updated.

6) TPM MIB

The TPM MIB has not progressed in almost a year, so the group discussed how and if this work could be completed. The TPM metrics are still not published, which is a major open issue. There doesn't seem to be WG consensus on what the TPM metrics should be, or even if the RMONMIB WG is the appropriate WG to define them (instead of IPPM).

The group discussed how TPM fits into the PM framework envisioned by the SSPM authors, and how SSPM is impacted if TPM is not developed. There is some interest in utilizing the statistical reporting aspects of TPM in some new work more directly aligned with IPPM.

Such a proposal should be published as a private I-D and brought to the attention of the WG and OPS A-Ds,

The TPM work item will be removed from the RMONMIB charter, unless it is completed by the next IETF. So far, little to no discussion of existing TPM versions has occurred on the mailing list.

7) Application Verbs

The group discussed a proposal to split up this draft into two documents, similar to the PI Reference and PI Macros RFCs, and decided against the idea for various reasons.

There appears to be WG consensus that the reference portion of the document is complete, and the only thing needed is more verb definitions for specific application protocols. Verb submissions from any interested parties should be sent as soon as possible to the WG mailing list (rmonmib@ietf.org).

8) SSPM

The group discussed if and when this work item should be added to the WG charter. An updated charter proposal will be created by the WG Chair and sent to the WG mailing list and OPS A-Ds for comments.

A proposed performance monitoring framework was discussed in some detail, which utilizes IPPM metrics and the TPM, SSPM, and APM MIB modules. Refer to the SSPM slides for more details on this topic.

9) SMON MIB (should have been on agenda)

A call for implementation reports has been issued on the WG mailing list for RFC 2613 (SMON). Developers of any implementation of this MIB are urged to send an interoperability report to the WG mailing list or the WG Chair (at abierman@cisco.com) as soon as possible.

Slides

Agenda
Requirements on the RMONMIB and IPPM Efforts
APM MIB Update