Internet Info 1994 March/Internet Info CD-ROM (Walnut Creek) (March 1994).iso/inet/ietf/opstat/opstat-minutes-92mar.txt

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    Minutes from the Operational Statistics Working Group meetings at
    the San Diego IETF, March 16-20, 1992.

    Participants:

    Chris Myers             [e-mail]
    Nevil Brownbe           [e-mail]
    Brian Shiflett          [e-mail]
    Jim Alfieri             [e-mail]
    Ken Goodwin             [e-mail]
    Stefan Fassbender       [e-mail]
    David Waitman           [e-mail]
    Robert J Reschly Jr     [e-mail]
    Ron Roberts             [e-mail]
    Henry Clark             [e-mail]
    Frances Yeh             [e-mail]
    Al Wiersma              [e-mail]
    Ursula Sinkewicz        [e-mail]
    Miriam Nihart           [e-mail]
    Dale S Johnsson         [e-mail]
    Vikas Aggarwal          [e-mail]
    Pushpendre Mohte        [e-mail]
    Bill Bliss              [e-mail]
    Tom Easterday           [e-mail]
    Frank Solensky          [e-mail]
    Linda Liebengood        [e-mail]
    Kary Robertson          [e-mail]
    Hock-Koon Lim           [e-mail]
    Bill Mannings           [e-mail]


First session, Tuesday March 17.

 1. Review of the OPSTAT document.

    The document on "A Internet Model for Operational Statistics" was
    reviewed. Decisions:

    - In listings of MIB variables suggested for gathering the name
      shall be the last part of the fully qualified MIB name as long as
      this uniquely defines the variable.

    - A suggestion of adding InErrors and OutErrors was not approved as
      these variables are counted differently in different MIB
      implementations.

    - Valid types for bandwidths and protocol types should be explicitly
      enumerated.

    - The timezone part of the timestamp in the datasection is redundant
      and is moved to the devicesection.

    - It shall be more clearly stated that document gives
      recommendations and polling and saving periods are not mandatory.

    After these changes have been included the meeting decided that the
    document shall be submitted as Internet Draft.  Changes suggested
    that would make major changes necessary can be discussed and decided
    on during the six month Internet Draft reviewing period.

 2. SQL Database

    The meeting discussed possible use of SQL database technique As SQL
    is optimized for other purposes than retrieval of serialized data
    the meeting concluded that SQL was not appropriate to use in
    retrieval of statistical data.

 3. Implementations of the OPSTAT model

    The meeting made a review of NOC's prepared to implement the
    operational statistical model when the Internet Draft is submitted.
    Below NOC's who were represented at this meeting expressed interest:

      Merit (Dale Johnsson)
      New Zeeland (Nevil Brownbe)
      RIPE NCC (Daniel Karrenberg)
      EUnet (Daniel Karrenberg on behalf of Joy Marino)

 4. Need of theoretical framework

    The meeting discussed the need for a theoretical statistical
    framework as current thinking to some extent is based in practical
    experiences. Kim Cluffy, SDSC, is writing a PhD thesis on analysis
    of wide area network. The output may have a lot in common with the
    OPSTAT work. Bellcore has developed models for statistical analysis
    of data from packet switch networks which also could show beneficial
    for the OPSTAT work. Contact shall be taken with Bellcore to
    investigate if their models also could fit in the Internet
    architecture.


Session 2, Wednesday March 18.

 5. Review of future activities.

    At an early stage the OPSTAT group discussed possibilities of using
    a client/server based system for retrieval of statistical data. The
    meeting agreed that such model would be useful to offload network
    equipment from SNMP processing and to enforce access control of
    statistical data.

    Some similar system may already exist. As examples were mentioned a
    system developed by DEC.

 6. Review of existing tools.

    NASA have tools that currently is configured for 1 minute polling.
    The 1 minute polls are stored internally in the program and 15
    minutes average and peaks are being stored onto secondary storage.
    The NASA statistical tools may be made publically available.

    Milo Medin, NASA, expressed the need of differentiating between
    statistical tools and monitoring tools. SNMP access is not the same
    as access to statistical data. A client/server based system may show
    useful in accessing logged data when there is no "public" snmp
    access. Another method would be to give access to the tables and
    diagrams produced from statistical data.

    OARnet have tools that currently does weekly loggings of the data.
    The tools are more oriented towards logging of error conditions.

    RIPE NCC has tools developed from the ISODE snmp code using gawk
    with snmp capabilities. These tools are already adopted to the
    OPSTAT thinking and changes to reflect the lastest storage formats
    may easily be included.  Daniel Karrenberg gave a short presentation
    of these tools.

    RICE University are using enhanced Merit tools. The tools are
    written for AIX and SUN Sparc and could be made publically
    available.