Editor's note:  These minutes have not been edited.
 
From: Jon Saperia <saperia@networks.bgs.com>

The Applications MIB working group met Wednesday and Thursday at the
IETF meetings in San Jose.  Below is a very brief description of the
progress made. 

Phase I  - the sysAppl MIB:

  With the work on the sysAppl MIB completed, the MIB was submitted for
  review and advancement last month. 

Phase II - the applMIB and WWW MIB:

  The 2 working group sessions focused on the new tasks at hand:
  development of the Application Management MIB which will contain a
  common set of attributes for managing generic applications and which
  will most likely require instrumentation in the application, and the
  development of the WWW MIB - a case example of a application-specific
  MIB module.

New Schedule for Application and WWW  MIBs:

  Jan. 17     -  First real draft 
  Feb. 28     -  2nd draft
  April 7-11  -  IETF in Memphis
  May 30      -  3rd draft
  July 11     -  4th draft
  Aug. 11-15  -  IETF in Munich
  Sept. 12    -  5th draft
  Dec.        -  IETF meeting (TBD if we will need to meet)


The first session mainly focused on over-all architecture
issues such as whether the MIB should be a single MIB with
table entries for each application's information, or whether
there should be one MIB with each application implementing
an instance of the MIB (ala entity MIB).  The group decided
to take the first approach.  Discussion followed with issues
on relationships between MIB modules, the index discovery
problem, index assignment, and subagent dependency.

The second session started with a summary by Carl Kalbfleisch
on the current status of the WWW MIB.  Next, Randy led the
discussion to select topics of information that will be
included in the Application MIB, and those topics which
we deem to be out of the scope of this MIB. 


   The following topics are within the scope of the this document:

        -    Support for generic application throughput measurements;

        -    Providing MIB definitions that allow managed entities to
             report what they considered to be units of work;

        -    Providing support for generic application response time
             monitoring capabilities;

        -    Provide explicit support for the management of applications
             distributed within a single managed system ("local" distri-
             bution);

        -    Address generic resource management issues, including:

             -    files in use;

             -    I/O statistics (from the application's perspective,
                  not at the operating system or device driver level);

             -    other resources are open to discussion, possibilities
                  include:

                  -    various system calls;

                  -    heap usage;

                  -    stack penetration;

                  -    networking resources.

             -    Providing access to dependency information, both in
                  the form of MIB objects to report dependencies on

                  "mission critical" processes, as well as the logging
                  of failures due to dependencies.

        -    Provide a generic logging (stderr) capability:

             -    Identify common application log entries interest;

             -    Permit use of specialized log entries where appropri-
                  ate;

             -    Provide generic facility for the management of this
                  log;

             -    Provide generic facility to control notification gen-
                  eration by the application;

        -    Facilities for the control of applications, including:

             -    Starting and stopping applications and their elements;

             -    Suspending and resuming applications and their ele-
                  ments;

             -    Configuration of application parameters;

             -    A "mission critical process" MIB to identify processes
                  that are of particular interest;

             -    Reconfiguration (e.g., SIGHUP) request capability.

   Some topics were identified as being of interest to the applmib work-
   ing group, but outside the scope of this document.

     -    Providing MIB definitions that allow management to define what
          is to be considered an error.  This includes mechanisms for
          filtering and selective forwarding of information from notifi-
          cations or log entries.

   Topics identified as specifically out of scope include:

     -    Providing MIB definitions to allow dynamic control of the def-
          inition of units of work;

     -    Explicit support for the management of applications
          distributed across multiple systems; this can be dealt with
          via the management applications

     -    Issues of backup and recovery;

     -    Issues of software request, delivery, installation, activa-
          tion, patching, version update, reversion, and removal;

     -    Issues of software validation and integrity checks;

     -    Issues of software licensing.

There were a number of action items that were identified during the
course of the meeting:

       1.  Several people [Randy, Carl, etc. - who were they]
       'volunteered to help conduct another review of existing mibs and
       their tables to identify interrelationships to each other and
       the output of this working group.

       2.  Additional tables may need to be defined to help management
       applications more efficiently retrieve application data from
       agents.  Another group will work on this activity.

       3.  The results of the efforts of the two tasks above will be
       reviewed with the Area Director and recommendations for changes
       to existing MIBs made after consultation with the affected
       working group chairs.