Subject: Re: <draft-ietf-disman-remops-mib-03.txt>

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 1999 21:48:35 -0500

Alan,

>I have quietly followed the recent remops MIB discussions.  Having
>been a network analyst in a previous job, I noticed omissions from
>the remops ping MIB that I believe would enhance its usefulness.  I
>was wondering if the omissions were intentional and the rationale
>for the omissions.

>Specifically, it seems impossible to configure the current ping MIB to
>periodically ping specified IP addresses and report when the ping fails.
>As written in  draft-ietf-disman-remops-mib-03.txt,  even using the
>scheduling MIB, it appears impossible to use the ping MIB to provide
>this capability.  This is true because the ping MIB neither supports
>notifications nor saving the configuration in non-volatile storage.

I think this depends on whether there is a management application that
periodically polls the results and/or relies on a notification to
be sent when a ping fails to detect when a network resource becomes
unavailable. I think it would be useful to define a notification in the
ping MIB to report when a ping fails. Should the notification be sent
every time a probe fails? Just the first time or periodically? Sending it
every time a probe fails could result in a large amount of notifications
being sent into management consoles for example. Sending it just on the
first failure isn't sufficient given the nature of notifications. What
would you suggest?

>Although as drafted the ping MIB certainly has value in assisting with
>network analysis after network problems occur and have been reported
>by network users, the ping MIB seems to be unable to proactively monitor
>IP hosts and alert the network operations staff when IP "connectivity"
>is lost.  From past experience as a network analyst, and requests I've
>received from my customers, I believe this proactive monitoring
>capability would fill a real need in network analysts' toolchests.
>Omitting the proactive-monitoring capability from a standards-track
>MIB seems very unfortunate because individual vendors would still
>solve the problem, but with non-standard, proprietary MIBs.

Bob, has also made this comment and in my last reply I suggested some
changes to the ping MIB to enable it to periodically issue pings requests
as well as being used for simply seeing the results of a series of
ping requests.

>Am I overlooking something, is this functionality outside of the scope
>of the remops purpose, are there other standard/proprietary/copyrighted/
>patented MIBs to provide this capability, or is there some other reason
>for this omission?

I don't think that your comments are out of scope.

Ken

---

From: Bob Stewart <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 08:52:13 -0500

At 09:48 PM 2/16/99 -0500, [email-masked] wrote:
>I think it would be useful to define a notification in the
>every time a probe fails?

No.  It should be sent when the test is complete, that is, when all message
exchanges have either succeeded or failed.

	Bob