Subject: Protocol Action: Network Services Monitoring MIB to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2000 09:58:27 -0500

The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'Network Services Monitoring
MIB' <draft-ietf-madman-netsm-mib-07.txt> as a Proposed Standard.  This
document is the product of the Mail and Directory Management Working
Group.  The IESG contact persons are Keith Moore and Patrik Faltstrom.

Technical Summary
 
  A networked application is a realization of some well-defined service
  on one or more host computers that is accessible via some network,
  uses some network for its internal operations, or both.

  There are a wide range of networked applications for which it is
  appropriate to provide SNMP monitoring of their network usage.
  This includes applications using both TCP/IP and OSI networking.
  This document defines a MIB which contains the elements common to
  the monitoring of any network service application. This information
  includes a table of all monitorable network service applications,
  a count of the associations (connections) to each application,
  and basic information about the parameters and status of each
  application-related association.

  This MIB may be used on its own for any application, and for most
  simple applications this will suffice.  This MIB is also designed
  to serve as a building block which can be used in conjunction with
  application-specific monitoring and management.  Two examples of
  this are MIBs defining additional variables for monitoring a Message
  Transfer Agent (MTA) service or a Directory Service Agent (DSA)
  service. It is expected that further MIBs of this nature will be
  specified.

  This MIB does not attempt to provide facilities for management of
  the host or hosts the network service application runs on, nor does
  it provide facilities for monitoring applications that provide
  something other than a network service.  Host resource and general
  application monitoring is handled by either the Host Resources MIB
  or the application MIB.

Working Group Summary

  The working group discussion on this document was brief and
  noncontroversial.

Protocol Quality

  During IETF Last Call and IESG review, it was pointed out that
  the MIB defined some objects with a Syntax of DisplayString,
  which is basically (US) NVT ASCII.
  These objects have been changed to now allow for international
  character strings and they now use UTF-8 based syntax. The
  approach taken is considered to have only a small (if any)
  impact for existing implementations.

  The document has been reviewed for the IESG by Steve Waldbusser
  and Bert Wijnen.