Subject: Proposed disman charter addition: alarm tracking

From: Randy Presuhn <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 12:04:58 -0800 (PST)

Hi -

Several people have read Sharon's draft and made substantive
comments to this list.  As working group chair, I'd like to
determine whether we have a consensus to request of our ADs
that this deliverable be added to our charter.  (The work
falls squarely within the existing scope of the charter,
in my opinion, so the only real question in my mind is
whether we have sufficient commitment in the group to
deliver a standards-track document.)

We should have one-or-two line description of the deliverables
and dates.  Here's a strawman, pulled out of the air:

   April, 2001: WG last call on Alarm Management MIB

   May, 2001: Alarm Management MIB delivered to IESG for
              consideration as proposed standard.

Sharon would be my choice as the document's editor.

Are these dates reasonable?  For example, should the scope
be expanded to include interworking with some non-SNMP
technologies?

 -------------------------------------------------------
 Randy Presuhn           [email-masked]
 Voice: +1 408 546-1006  BMC Software, Inc.  1-3141
 Fax:   +1 408 965-0359  2141 North First Street
 http://www.bmc.com/     San José, California 95131  USA
 -------------------------------------------------------
 My opinions and BMC's are independent variables.
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From: "Carl W. Kalbfleisch" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 14:34:44 -0600

Sounds reasonable to me. Does this mean disman would meet in March to review
this document?

Carl

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked]
> [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Randy Presuhn
> Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 2:05 PM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: Proposed disman charter addition: alarm tracking
>
>
>
> Hi -
>

---

From: "David T. Perkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 16:20:37 -0800

HI,

On one hand, the need for a MIB covering this subject area is great
and is a topic that is reoccuring on several of the SNMP mailing
lists and the SNMP news group. On the other hand, I believe the
ITU-T documents on which the Sharon's MIB is a based are "fatally flawed",
and these flaws are carried forward in Sharon's document.
Additionally, the approach that is used to implement a union,
which is a reuse of a design pattern used in other disman MIB
modules, has very bad performance characteristics for bulk
retrieval. I believe that after an IETF standards track alarm
MIB module is defined (and the definition allows highly efficient
implementation on an agent system AND low cost useage by management
applications), then this will be the most useful and widely
implemented set of objects!

Thus, I support adding an Alarm MIB module as a work item for
the DISMAN group, but do not support using the contribution
by Sharon without extensive modification. Before the MIB module
should be written, the model needs to be described, which
has not been done in the contribution. This is really needed
due to differing uses of the "alarm" (and associated) terminology
and differing alarm models by vendors. 

The suggested schedule looks too agressive to me. I believe
that it should be extended by a 3 months and that time used
to develop a separate document that describes the model
(or include the description in the MIB module document).

Regards,
/david t. perkins

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From: Bob Natale <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 00:19:00 -0500

At 11/29/2000:07:20 PM, David T. Perkins wrote:

Hi Dave,

>On one hand, the need for a MIB covering this subject area is great

I agree.

><...>
>On the other hand, I believe the ITU-T documents on which the Sharon's
>MIB is a based are "fatally flawed", and these flaws are carried forward
>in Sharon's document.

Could you please outline those fatal flaws...?

Thanks,

BobN

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From: Juergen Schoenwaelder <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2000 10:56:12 +0100

>>>>> Randy Presuhn writes:

Randy> Several people have read Sharon's draft and made substantive
Randy> comments to this list.  As working group chair, I'd like to
Randy> determine whether we have a consensus to request of our ADs
Randy> that this deliverable be added to our charter.

As I said earlier, I believe that this is an important missing piece.
However, I previously aired concerns about the model used in Sharon's
draft to define what an alarm really is.

Regarding the ITU alarm work, I think it is worthwhile to align this
piece of work as much as possible with the ITU alarm models since I
believe that the ITU alarm model has seen quite a bit of usage in the
telco world. In fact, I have been talking to several operators that
require to translate notifications into ITU alarms - which is not
always nice an easy to do. Working out an alarm model for the SNMP
community should make such mappings simpler and more consistent.

Summary: I believe this work should be done (in this WG or elsewhere)
and Sharon's draft is just a starting point. I have doubts that this
can be finished by the next IETF if we want to get it right. I also
think it is crucial to get the right group of knowledgeable people
together to do this in a timely manner.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder      Technical University Braunschweig
<[email-masked]>  Dept. Operating Systems & Computer Networks
Phone: +49 531 391 3289    Bueltenweg 74/75, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany
Fax:   +49 531 391 5936    <URL:http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/~schoenw/>