CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Osmund de Souza/AT&T OPSTAT Minutes The proposed Agenda for the meeting was: o Administration o Metrics - old, new, and exotic o Measurement polling periods o Query language and exchange protocol o Report formats o Closing The proposed Agenda was approved. Osmund de Souza volunteered to take the Minutes. Metrics: The group reviewed the metrics that have been proposed so far. Bernhard had written a ``metrics paper'' before the meeting to help focus the discussion. We agreed that the basic set of measurements should include the following: o Octets in/out, unicast packets in/out, non-unicast packets in/out for each interface. o IP packets forwarded, IP packet discarded, (similar counts for other network layer protocols), for each router. We then talked about whether we should expand this set to include new and exotic metrics and if so, what they should be. There were ideas about measuring availability, stability, delay performance, congestion, and line errors. We decided that rather than try to come to a conclusion at the meeting we would take it to the mailing list. We did agree that the metrics paper should not explicitly include or exclude these new measures, but rather should leave the door open for expanding the base set later. We also agreed that initially it would be wise to work with variables within the current MIB structure, though this should not limit us as the opstat architecture matures. Measurement: As usual, we had a lively discussion about measurement polling intervals. Vikas Aggarwal presented the results of a study he did on JvNCNet. In the study he periodically polled each interface in the network to download traffic data to a central manager. Since it took three minutes to poll all the interfaces, the polling period was three minutes. He computed the utilization of each link in the network for each three minute interval, and also for integer multiples of three minutes by aggregating the measurements. The results showed that as the ``integration'' interval increased, the average of the average 1 utilization in each interval remained unchanged (to within some small error) but the variation in average utilization for each interval decreased. Hence, for instance, the three minute utilizations had several peaks above 70 The discussion led to the understanding that measurement collection should ideally be done on a small enough time scale to capture short-term variations and peaks in traffic loads. Burstier traffic requires a smaller polling interval. However, small interval polling on a large network may be difficult for most network management systems, and there is the problem of storing the measurements for later processing. While no definite conclusion was reached on this one, the group is close to settling the issue by gravitating towards a polling interval of 5-15 minutes. Query Language: We reviewed the paper that Bernhard had put together (and circulated on the mailing list) to define a query language syntax for the statistics client/server model. The language is geared around the following simple commands: login, exit, help, format, and select. There was some discussion about the meaning of the ``format'' command and what help the ``help'' command was supposed to give. We decided that ``format'' should let the user know the storage/presentation format of the data in the query, and that ``help'' should explain the meaning and syntax of commands as well as the nature of the data named in the query. Bernhard agreed to incorporate our comments in the document before resending it to the list. David O'Leary said that he may be able to get a (more?) graduate student to work on a statistics client/server protocol. He did not have a clear idea of the direction in which the work would proceed, but would keep the group updated through the mailing list. Report Formats: We did not have enough time to spend discussing the format of the reports. We reviewed the ideas that had come up at previous meetings and that Bernhard had summarized in a ``reports paper''. We did agree that we may have spent too much effort in the past defining the ``reports for upper management'', aka The McDonald's Report. We felt that we should concentrate on engineering reports for network operations and planning. These reports could then be stripped of an appropriate amount of useful information to present to upper management. Closing: An item that came up during the discussion was the need for us to interface more with other groups, notably SNMP, and Internet Accounting. We were also pleased about the progress we had made since our previous meeting in St. Louis. Finally the meeting agreed to use the papers produced by Bernhard as a basis for the continued work. Attendees Thomas Brisco brisco@rutgers.edu Gigi Chu gigic@hpspd.spd.hp.com 2 Henry Clark henryc@oar.net Shari Galitzer shari@gateway.mitre.org Kenneth Goodwin goodwin@psc.edu Phillip Gross pgross@nis.ans.net Michael Khalandovsky mlk@ftp.com Tim Lee-Thorp ngc!tim@uunet.uu.net Chris Myers chris@wugate.wustl.edu David O'Leary oleary@sura.net Robert Reschly reschly@brl.mil Mark Saake saake@llnl.gov Timothy Salo tjs@msc.edu Erik Sherk sherk@nmc.cit.cornell.edu Frank Solensky solensky@clearpoint.com Bernhard Stockman boss@sunet.se Roxanne Streeter streeter@nsipo.nasa.gov David Waitzman djw@bbn.com Chris Waters-Pierandozzi waters@jvnc.net Gerard White ger@concord.com Osmund de Souza desouza@osdpc.ho.att.com 3