Subject: [MIB-DOCTORS] SNMP w/JSON encoding?

From: Andy Bierman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 07:57:07 -0700

Hi,

Sorry for starting a tangent thread, but the common wisdom is
that SNMP is good for monitoring, and IMO that isn't even true.
ASN.1/BER encoding is CPU-expensive and varbinds contain
lots of redundant information. The encoding is very inefficient.

Karl Auerbach created something called KNMP that used JSON
encoding, but I don't think it went anywhere. JSON is designed
to reduce redundant information.  That's why we are supported
it w/ REST and NETCONF APIs. It is simple and widely deployed.

I am surprised that no standards effort has ever been attempted
to improve the encoding efficiency of SNMP, especially for tables that
have complex INDEX clauses.

Andy

---

From: Juergen Schoenwaelder <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 17:19:27 +0200

> have complex INDEX clauses.

There was EOS and it failed.

BER encoding may not be the most compact encoding, but I very much
doubt it is CPU expensive (and this is also what measurements have
confirmed - the time spent on the encoding/decoding part of the
message processing is negligible).

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder           Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH
Phone: +49 421 200 3587         Campus Ring 1, 28759 Bremen, Germany
Fax:   +49 421 200 3103         <http://www.jacobs-university.de/>

---

From: Andy Bierman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 09:09:58 -0700

> message processing is negligible).

The main issue is PDU size on the wire, not CPU efficiency.
varbinds would be fine if the manager were asking for
lots of unrelated OIDs, but they don't.  The problem is the
worst for retrieval of lots of counters for the same table
with a really long INDEX (e.g., IPv6 addresses in them).

But I don't think EOS-2 should be started.
I just think it's odd (given the UDP transport) that this issue never
came up again.

Andy

---

From: Andy Bierman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 11:01:34 -0700

> There was EOS and it failed.

Too bad -- I don't think OID compression was controversial.
I remember everybody liked it.  That was 12 years ago so
I could be imagining that was what happened ;-)

Andy