Subject: Catching "missed alarms"

From: "Thomas, Steven C (Steve)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 12:23:50 -0400

Thanks for the updated draft-ietf-disman-snmp-alarm-mib-01.txt!

Need: I work with several management applications that elect to mostly
receive their alarm information via notifications.  Because of a concern
about missing alarm notifications, they want to quickly identify when and if
they have missed any alarm notifications and retrieve them.  In the above
MIB, the "manager" can poll the values of snmpAlarmLogFirstIndex and
snmpAlarmLogLastIndex.  Those can show the manager what alarm logs might be
missing. But they only show what is missing if the "manager" is regularly
retrieving and "shadowing" the alarm log table.

Proposal: Add the variable snmpAlarmLogLastIndex to the notifications
(snmpAlarmStatusChange and snmpItuAlarmStatusChange).  Adding this index
value will enable the "manager" to immediately notice when a log entry has
been skipped and immediately retrieve it.

Of course, the requestor will still need to periodically poll the values,
since silence doesn't necessarily mean that all is well.

Also we could implement this locally by having the snmpAlarmLogLastIndex as
the first varbind of each of our alarm notifications.  Perhaps there is a
more general need and solution.

Cheers,
Steve

---

From: "David T. Perkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2001 12:18:14 -0700

HI,

Steve - thanks for the suggestion on optimizing the use of the tables
in the MIB.

All - please note that this I-D was sent in before the IETF meeting,
but after the deadline, and is just showing up now. Hope that this did
not create confusion.

During the IETF meeting and afterwards, much work was done on refining
the model. I have been pretty silent (on email) waiting for a consensus
to form.

Regards,
/david t. perkins