Subject: WG Review: Revised Charter for Remote Network Monitoring (rmonmib)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 10:02:38 -0500

A revised charter has been received for the Remote Network Monitoring
(rmonmib) Working Group, and is provided here for informational
purposes.

The current charter can be accessed at: 

	http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/rmonmib-charter.html

The IESG has not made any determination as yet. 

The following Description was submitted, and is provided for
informational purposes only:

The RMON MIB Working Group is chartered to define a set of managed
objects for remote monitoring of networks. These objects will be the
minimum necessary to provide the ability to monitor multiple network
layers of traffic in remote networks; providing fault, configuration,
and performance management, and will be consistent with the SNMP
framework and existing SNMP standards.

The following list of features for this RMON has been previously
discussed in relation to existing RMON functionality and is included to
focus these RMON activities. It is recognized that other issues may be
considered and that certain of the following issues may not be part of
the final specification(s):

1) Application Performance Measurement
   Monitoring support for the measurement and characterization of
   network application protocols, striving to measure an
   application user's experience as closely as possible.
   The RMON-2 MIB (RFC 2021) contains a protocol directory
   that will be used to identify applications for monitoring
   purposes.

   While it is important to measure the performance of computing
   and network resources, these measurements don't give an insight
   to the actual service delivered to end-users. This end-user
   experience is best measured by the response-time and availability
   of application transactions because users interact directly
   with applications. This working group will create extensions
   to the RMON-2 MIB that will allow Application Performance
   Measurements to be retrieved with SNMP, no matter which
   technology is used to perform the measurements.

   The goal of the working group is to provide a common framework
   and set of MIB objects, within the current RMON framework,
   for the identification and characterization of application
   responsiveness and availability, and the reporting of
   test results produced by such mechanisms.  Common metrics and
   derived metrics will be characterized and reported in a manner
   consistent with the IP Performance Metrics Framework (RFC 2330).

   It is an explicit non-goal of the working group to select
   one or more mechanisms as the preferred or standard RMON
   application performance measurement mechanism. However, it is
   possible that one or more standard mechanisms will be
   developed in the future, after significant implementation
   experience has been gained by the working group.

2) Differentiated Services Statistics Collection
   Monitoring support for Differentiated Services (DS) statistics
   collection, for the purpose of DS codepoint usage analysis
   and possibly other statistics related to DS deployment and
   performance tuning.

3) Interface TopN Reporting
   It is often too slow or difficult to determine the
   busiest ports in devices such as high port-density switches,
   using existing RMON mechanisms.
   New monitoring support is needed for quickly determining
   the most congested (highest utilized) physical ports and
   links in an RMON-capable device with multiple interfaces.

4) TR-RMON MIB Advancement
   The Token Ring RMON MIB (RFC 1513) is ready for standards
   track advancement. An interoperability and deployment survey
   has already been completed, but the MIB must be updated in
   SMIv2 format before it can be advanced on the standards track.