Subject: Internet Draft for table modifications tracking MIB...

From: Niraj Gopal <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2002 14:58:14 -0700

Hi,

I've authored a MIB to track modifications in other MIB
tables. As you know, NMSes (Network Management
Stations) usually poll these MIB tables at regular intervals
to gather  data, and compare it with the data from earlier
polls to determine if anything significant has changed.

Some of these tables can be huge (e.g., a core router's
routing table might have tens of thousands of entries),
and often little or none of the data varies between
polls. Bandwidth and CPU are wasted in uselessly
transferring data.

To minimize this waste, this MIB allows an NMS to
register for "change monitoring" in the tables it's
interested in. This MIB then tracks changes in the
registered tables, allowing the NMS to poll one table
to determine if others need to be polled. The MIB is
flexible enough to allow the NMS to track changes in
only a few objects in the table coz sometimes stats
info (counters etc.) is also included along with the
config  info in single MIB table.

This MIB keeps track of all changes, including adding
a new row, deletion of a row, and modification of an
object in a row. It can also be configured to send
change notifications to an NMS.

Thus, by polling this table and/or listening to this MIB's
notifications, the NMS can find out which tables have
changed since the last poll and choose to poll only those
tables instead of polling all tables at fixed intervals.

This MIB has been in limited use in Cisco for more than
a year and has proved useful in reducing the time required
to synchronize the config data between the NMS and the
NE especially when the config data is huge and the number
of managed NEs is very large. There is also a Cisco patent
pending against this MIB.

I unknowingly missed the deadline for submitting this ID
by a few hours and will make it a real ID after Yokohama
meeting. Randy has been kind enough to put it on the
DISMAN WG's ftp site at:

ftp://amethyst.bmc.com/pub/disman/ietf54/draft-niraj-tmt-mib-00.txt

Please send me your comments.

Thanks&Regards,
-Niraj