Subject: Minutes of rperfman BOF in Adelaide

From: Randy Presuhn <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2000 09:51:21 -0700 (PDT)

Hi -

These are the minutes, based on Andy Bierman's detailed notes,
for the rperfman (Remote Performance Management) BOF session
held on March 30, 2000 at the IETF meeting in Adelaide.

Randy Presuhn opened the session with an overview of the
proposed agenda, which required no changes.  Andy Bierman
agreed to take detailed notes for the minutes.

For purposes of discussion, the larger problem space of
remote performance management was divided into seven major
areas: instrumentation, instrumentation control, metrics, data
reduction, data reduction control, collection coordination, and
performance management applications.  Randy outlined how these
mapped to current work in progress by various working groups.

Carl Kalbfleisch gave a presentation of requirements arising
from his experiences at Verio.  Key points included the need
to support multiple monitoring applications, to eliminate
redundant polling, to make the configuration of the tests
tractable, and, finally, to have useful applications for
managing performance.

Dan Romascanu gave a presentation on the use of active probes
for performance monitoring, covering the material which is to
appear in draft-cole-appm-00.txt.  This presentation covered
the roles and usage of active probes.  It also contrasted
them with classical RMONMIB passive monitoring.  Examples of
use included trouble-shooting, circuit pre-testing, fault
management, end-to-end capacity management, and SLA monitoring.

The discussion then turned to the various tradeoffs involved in
using active and passive probe technologies.  Some benefits of
active probe technologies include control of the sampling and
the probe characteristics.  On the other hand, this generated
traffic adds to network load, and is only a simulation, rather
than measuring real user traffic.

Randy asked the group some questions to get a sense of the room:
  Do we want to create new primary metrics?  No.
  Is traffic injection being used for performance measurement?  Yes, lots.
  Is it automated?  Yes.
  Is there a need to standardized its management?  Yes.

A question came from audience regarding QoS performance
monitoring and the need DIFFSERV monitoring.  The responses
were to use DS-MON to monitor DS flows (work from the rmonmib
working group) and to use the DIFFSERV MIB to monitor the DS
forwarding points.

The discussion turned to APPM architectural issues, including
the need for a framework to cover both network and application
layers, transport metrics, configuration control, and the
relationship to fault management and data reduction, based
on standard instrumentation, or at least instrumentation that
can be managed in a standard way.  Deployment considerations,
e.g., where to put active probes, can impact validity and
usefulness of data.  Security is also an issue, to control
the configuration, traffic rate, type of traffic, and so on
since active probes could easily be used for denial-of-service
attacks.

A brief survey of related work within the IETF mentioned
IPPM, defining metrics to be collected, DISMAN, defining
some active probe functions (remops) and data aggregation
(expression, script MIB) capabilities, RMON, defining passive
monitoring, application monitoring, and reporting, ApplMIB,
defining additional application performance information
measured at the application (client or server), as well as
RTFM, BMWG, and frnetMIB's service work.

Steve Waldbusser asked how the 'big picture' slide relates to
traffic generation configuration.  Randy sees more interesting
work in the data collection from many points and data reduction
(like snmpconf) that these are separate problems, but that
historically the IETF has not made the distinction.

Andy Bierman questioned the need for a standard to glue all
components together, since this has traditionally done by
management station applications.  However, he does see a
clear need for standard knobs to setup traffic generators.
This led to the question of whether this can be modularized
so the application does not have to provide all the components
and set them up from scratch every time they are needed.

A review of configuration issues for probes included
sampling methods (IPPM describes some sampling strategies
and implementation details), probe configuration details,
such as data configuration and path selection, the choice of
statistics, traffic rate, and many others.

The review of implementation issues for probe control touched
on several points.  The packet generation needs to be carefully
defined.  The clock resolution of traffic generators needs
to be understood.  The error analysis phase needs to identify
the errors that may be introduced in measurements.

Discussion of potential work items in this area included
the development of a framework document on active monitoring
within the Internet framework, the development of a MIB for
active probe configuration, and the definition of MIBs for
access to the transport and network level metrics that have
already been defined by various working groups.

Follow-up questions included: How does the CAIDA work relate to
this area?  How about an IPPM implementation (source & sink)?

A person who works for an ISP voiced the concern that active
probes should be developed by IETF so that they are constrained
and well-behaved in order to reduce risk of abuse.

Steve Waldbusser argued that since people are already using
this technology, and lots of companies are doing this, it is
premature for IETF to standardize, and the work should be done
in RMON when we are ready.  He observed that doing synthetic
transaction monitoring is not just sending octet string and
waiting for a response, that synthetic transactions need lots
of config details, including state machine for the protocols,
knowledge of the network, transport and application layers.
There are many ways to do this work, but it is too hard
for PeopleSoft, that some generators are reduced to pushing
buttons on the applications, that Ganymede does not do the
real application, but instead does a very proprietary approach.

Steve concluded that this work should be carried out in the
RMON working group.  He cited the TR-RMON's active components
as precedent, and offered that active network layer probes
were only deferred because of RMON-2 work.  Furthermore, RMON
was just chartered for APM, and this includes reporting of
synth transactions.  RMON will need to address this later;
it will be harder if there is overlapping charters and RMON
has to redo some work to fit with the PD and APM.

Randy countered that there is a difference between
"programming" an active probe, which requires between knowing
all the details, and standardizing the 'on/off' button.
He cited the application MIB work, which abstracts out the
comment elements of applications, and doesn't even try to
represent the peculiarities, leaving those aspects to device,
vendor, or application-specific MIBs.

Steve replied that RMON found on/off to be insufficient.

Randy continued that aggregation of data from many points
of collection is not covered by RMON. There may be a need
to recombine into new tables, not just multiple instances of
the RMON MIB.

Dan Romascanu agreed with Steve on the need to increase
the priority of those issues in the RMON WG; still need to
correlate data from many different places.

Russell Dietz gave the next presentation, explaining the RMON
APM/TPM framework.  The top-level elements were the APMCAPS,
APM study, and TPM study.

The APM and TPM linked by flow measurements; APM gives
high-level and TPM gives microflow.  The TPM serves as a
drilldown for APM.

APMCAPs has a hook to point to the control mechanism for
a test, if available. It could point to standard MIBs like
DISMAN remops or proprietary MIBs.

TPM has a microflow decomposition for the APM user experience.
TPM has statistical reporting.  Russell wants feedback from
the BOF so the drafts in progress can accommodate requirements
from this work.

Randy gave a recap of what had been covered and glossed over
during the session, including configuration management issues
for active probes, the correlation problems for relating
measurements from different sources.  Possible deliverables
would depend on which working group or groups took up
the project.  This would also have to be done with some
consciousness of the work already in progress.  One possibility
would be to generate an architecture document addressing the
issues of cross-system reporting.

The agenda turned to considering the possible paths forward.
Randy asked for a sense of the room on each of the possibilities:
   a) a new WG -- no interest from anybody
   b) disman -- if we focus on infrastructure
   c) applmib -- not any interest; focused on apps, 
      not network
   d) rmon 
   e) something else

The consensus emerged to let RMON continue to focus on the
instrumentation, instrumentation control, and single-system
reporting.  Disman appeared to be the right place to handle
multi-system data reduction and data reduction control.
SNMPCONF would appear to be the right place to handle the
cross-system collection configuration coordination.  IPPM and
other working groups would continue to define fundamental
metrics.  A gap is ensuring that those metrics, once defined,
are somehow made visible to management.

The following action items were agreed:
  RMON -- consider requirements for active probe control
          during the APM/TPM work, and
          start work right after APM/TPM
  DISMAN -- look at data correlation issues from 
            multiple probes
  SNMPCONF -- allow for this work to use snmpconf

Consequently, it was felt that there was no need for a  new
mailing list, and that these 3 lists would be appropriate
for further discussion.

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 Randy Presuhn           [email-masked]       http://www.bmc.com/
 Voice: +1 408 546-1006  BMC Software, Inc.  1-3141  2141 N. First Street
 Fax:   +1 408 965-0359  San Jose, California 95131  USA
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 Any relationship between my opinions and BMC's should be coincidental.
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