Distributed Management (disman) Charter

NOTE: This charter is accurate as of the 37th IETF Meeting in San Jose. It may now be out-of-date. (Consider this a "snapshot" of the working group from that meeting.) Up-to-date charters for all active working groups can be found elsewhere in this Web server.

Chair(s)

Network Management Area Director(s):

Mailing List Information

Description of Working Group

The Distributed Management Working Group is chartered to define an initial set of managed objects for specific distributed network management applications and a framework in which these applications and others can be consistently developed and deployed. A distributed network manager is an application that acts in a manager role to perform management functions and in an agent role so that it can be remotely controlled and observed.

Distributed network management is widely recognized as a requirement for dealing with today's growing internets. A manager application is a good candidate for distribution if it requires minimal user interaction, it would potentially consume a significant amount of network resources due to frequent polling or large data retrieval, or it requires close association with the device(s) being managed.

The working group will limit its work to distributed network management applications where the communication mechanism used between managers (or the components of the management application) is SNMP. Future work (and other working groups) may be chartered to investigate other distribution techniques such as CORBA or HTTP. The objects defined by the working group will be consistent with the SNMP framework. The working group will especially keep security considerations in mind when defining the interface to distributed management.

The working group will complete these tasks:

o Define a Threshold Monitoring MIB o Define a Script MIB o Define a Distribution Management Framework and MIB

This last MIB is required in order to keep distributed managers from adding to the management problem. This MIB will allow distributed managers of many types to be controlled in a consistent way including controlling their "management domain" (the set of devices upon which they act), the relationships between the management applications or components, and to some extent the scheduling of their operation.

The working group will consider existing definitions, including:

o RFC1451, The Manager to Manager MIB which was being considered by the SNMPv2 working group

o the RMON working group's work in this area

o the SNMP Mid-Level-Manager MIB which is now an expired Internet-Draft

o the work of the Application MIB working group

It is recognized that the scope of this working group is narrow relative to the potential in the area of distributed network management. This is intentional in order to increase the likelihood of producing useful, quality specifications in a timely manner. However, we will keep in mind and account for potential related or future work when developing the framework including:

o Event and alarm logging and distribution o Historical data collection/summarization o Topology discovery

Goals and Milestones

May 96
Post Internet-Draft for Threshold Monitoring MIB.
Jun 96
Meet at the Montreal IETF meeting to discuss charter and review the Threshold Monitoring MIB Internet-Draft.
Jul 96
Post Internet-Draft for Framework document.
Aug 96
Post Internet-Draft for Script MIB.
Sep 96
Hold an interim meeting to discuss Internet-Drafts and issues that come up on the mailing list.
Nov 96
Submit final version of Threshold Monitor MIB Internet-Draft for consideration as a Proposed Standard. Submit updated versions of Internet-Drafts for Script MIB and the Framework document.
Dec 96
Meet at the IETF meeting to discuss Internet-Drafts and issues that come up on the mailing list.
Feb 97
Submit final versions of Internet-Drafts for Script MIB and Framework document for consideration as Proposed Standards.

Current Internet-Drafts

No Request for Comments