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.