CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_


Reported by Phill Gross/CNRI, Steve Hunter/LBL
Bernhard Stockman/Nordunet and Dale Johnson/Merit

OPSTAT Minutes
The inaugural meeting of the Opstats Working Group was convened by
Bernhard Stockman and Phill Gross.  The primary purpose of the meeting
was to decide on how the NOCs could most effectively share their
operational statistics.  Phill presented a model of data sharing (see
below).

   _______________                 ______________
   |     New     |                 |    Old     |
   |  Collection |                 | Collection |
   |     Tool    |                 |    Tool    |
   |_____________|                 |____________|
                \                       |
                 \               ________|________
                  \              | Pre-Processor |
                   \             |_______________|
                    \             /
                     \           /
                     \         /
                      __________
                     /  Common  \
                     / Statistics \
                     \  Database  /
                     \__________/
                     /        \
                     /          \
                    /            \
                   /              \
                  /              __________________
                 /               | Post-Processor |
                /                |________________|
               /                        |
   ________________               _______|________
   |     New      |               |     Old      |
   | Presentation |               | Presentation |
   |     Tool     |               |     Tool     |
   |______________|               |______________|



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This model was based on previous work in the NJM working group and on
work by Bernhard at the Nordic Engineering Technical Forum (NETF). The
goal is to define, implement, and make available in the public domain,
the tools required for the model.  Issues


   o Legal, ethical and political concerns of data sharing.  People are
     concerned about showing data that may make one of the networks look
     bad.
   o Insure integrity, conformity and confidentiality of the shared
     data.  To be useful, the same data must be collected from all of
     the involved sites and it must be collected at the same interval.
     To prevent vendors from getting an unfair performance information,
     certain data must not be made available.
   o Access control methods.  Both of the above make this an obvious
     requirement.


Mailing list

Chris Myers (chris@wugate.wustl.edu) will set up the WG mailing list --
(oswg-l@wugate.wustl.edu).  Listserv commands can be sent to
listserv@wugate.wustl.edu (e.g., help, add).

List of Desired Operational Statistics

The group brainstormed a list of desired operational statistics.  We
began by laying out categories of important operational statistics:


   o UTILIZATION (throughput)
      -  traffic totals/period
      -  traffic peaks/period
      -  protocol usage/period
   o PERFORMANCE (delays, congestions)
      -  Ping statistics
      -  TCP RTT estimate
   o AVAILABILITY (long term accessability)

      -  Line availability (percentage line uptime)
      -  Route availability
      -  Service availability

   o STABILITY (short term accessability)

      -  Number of line status transitions per time unit
      -  ICMP behaviour
      -  Route stability.  (Compare to work done at Merit)

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          * Total number of route changes per time unit.
          * Total number of routes per interface and box (dumping the
            Route table is hard with the SNMP powerful GETNEXT operator,
            maybe add to MIB)
          * Next Hop count
          * Changes in traffic pattern


Both Availabilty and Stability would need asynchronous mechanisms,
traps, etc.  to be defined.

The next step was to define specific objects from the above categories.
It was recognized that not all this information might be easy to obtain.
Therefore, a "degree of difficulty" was assigned to each desired
statistic.  The list of desired operational statistics is below, where
the "degree of difficulty" is noted as:


  1. ( E) Easy, Variables already in standard MIB thus easy to retrieve.
  2. (HP) Hard, Variables that need high resolution polling which is
     hard due to resulting network load.
  3. (HM) Hard, Variables sometimes in private enterprise MIB thus could
     be hard to retrieve.
  4. ( I) Impossible, Variables not at all in the MIB thus impossible to
     retrieve using SNMP. Some variables could be proposed for future
     inclusion in MIB, but some variables cannot be retrieved by SNMP
     due to limitations in the SNMP specification.


For each interface:

   Packets in                       (E)
            (for each protocol)      (I)
   Packets out                      (E)
            (for each protocol)      (I)
   Octets in                        (E)
   Octets out                       (E)
   Aggregate errors in               (HM)
   Aggregate errors out              (HM)
   Congestion events in              (HM)
   Congestion events out             (HM)
   Seconds of missing statistics     (HP)
   Interface resets                  (HM)
    % interface unavailable          (HP)
   Routing Changes                   (HM)
   Interface route hop count         (HP)
   A distribution of queue length    (HP)
   Inter-packet arrival time         (I)
   Packet size distribution          (I)
   Line status                      (E)

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for the node:

   Packets forwarded (for each protocol)
            IP-                     (E)
            DECnet-                  (HM)
            OSI-                     (I)
   Packet size distribution          (HP)
   IP packets dropped for queue overflow(I)
   sysUpTime                        (E)


Therefore, the following metrics were chosen as desireable and
reasonable:

For each Interface:


   o Octets in
   o Octect out
   o Unicast packets in
   o Unicast packets out
   o Nonunicast packets in
   o Nonunicast packets out
   o In discards
   o Out discards
   o Line status
   o Number of routes in table(s) (If we can get it into the MIB)
   o Number of route changes (If we can get it into the MIB)


For the node:


   o IP forwards
   o IP discards
   o sysUpTime


Polling frequency

After much discussion, it was decided that all participating NOCs should
poll at fifteen minute intervals, or some interval which has fifteen
minutes as an integer multiple.  A five minute interval was desired by
some, but it requires too much disk and CPU resources unless it can be
shown to be obviously superior.  An alternative suggestion was to poll
fast, like every five minutes, but just store the high, low, and average
values once per hour.  This may also be researched.

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Common Data Storage Format (CDSF)

It was proposed that the data be stored as a flat file with the
following format:



   o Header Record:  This will be a table of tag identifiers.  A tag
     will be defined which uniquely identifies each data value as to its
     source node and data type.
   o Data Records:  Timestamp [TAB] Delta Time [TAB] tag [TAB] Object
     Value Where:

      -  Timestamp - yyyymmddhhmmssxxx and xxxx is the offset from GMT
      -  Delta Time - time, in seconds, since last poll
      -  Tag - Unique identifier defined above (ASCII string)
      -  Object Value- Change in SNMP counter or current status


Data Presentation

We will take this issue up in more detail at the next meeting.  It was
suggested that we study network status reports in the next Topology
Engineering Working Group to get ideas about diplay format.  Phill Gross
will ask the presenters at the next TEWG to give thought to how they
like to see operational data presented.

Data Collection Tools

We will take this issue up in more detail at the next meeting.

We need to consider the following in more detail:


   o SNMP based
   o NNstat
   o Ad Hoc scripts and methods (many folks have ad hoc methods in use)
   o Performance and Benchmarking tools and methods


Other notes:

Related work is being done by the following IETF WGs -- Remote LAN,
BMWG, NJM, TEWG. The following European groups are also doing work in
this area -- RIPE and NETF groups.  MERIT has been working quite a bit

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on this for the last four months.  A good reference for data display
formats is ``The Display of Quantitative Information'' by Edward R.
Tufte, published by Graphics Press, Box 430, Cheshire, CT 06410, c1983.

Attendees

Guy Almes                almes@rice.edu
Anne Ambler              anne@spider.co.uk
Karl Auerbach            karl@eng.sun.com
Scott Bradner            sob@harvard.edu
Randy Butler             rbutler@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Tom Easterday            tom@nisca.ircc.ohio-state.edu
Fred Engel               engel@concord.com
Mike Erlinger            mike@mti.com
Vince Fuller             vaf@Standford.EDU
Phillip Gross            pgross@nri.reston.va.us
Jack Hahn                hahn@umd5.umd.edu
Susan Hares              skh@merit.edu
Eugene Hastings          hastings@psc.edu
Steven Hunter            hunter@es.net
Dale Johnson             dsj@merit.edu
Ken Jones                uunet!konkord!ksj
Dan Jordt                danj@cac.washington.edu
Christopher Kolb         kolb@psi.com
Walter Lazear            lazear@gateway.mitre.org
Daniel Long              long@bbn.com
E. Paul Love             loveep@sdsc.edu
Marilyn Martin           martin@netcom.ubc.ca
Matt Mathis              mathis@pele.psc.edu
Milo Medin               medin@nsipo.nasa.gov
Cyndi Mills              cmills@bbn.com
Lynn Monsanto            monsanto@sun.com
Donald Morris            morris@ucar.edu
Chris Myers              chris@wugate.wustl.edu
David O'Leary            oleary@noc.sura.net
Mark Oros                oros@nmc.cit.cornell.edu
Robert Reschly           reschly@brl.mil
Bill Rust                wjr@ftp.com
Timothy Salo             tjs@msc.edu
Jonathan Saperia         saperia@tcpjon.enet.dec.com
Ken Schroder             schroder@bbn.com
Michael Schwartz         schwartz@boulder.colorado.edu
Marc Sheldon             ms@uni-dortmund.de
Bernhard Stockman        boss@sunet.se
Roxanne Streeter         streeter@nsipo.nasa.gov
Joanie Thompson          joanie@nsipo.nasa.gov
Kannan Varadhan          kannan@oar.net
Steven Waldbusser        waldbusser@andrew.cmu.edu
Carol Ward               cward@spot.colorado.edu
Dan Wintringham          danw@osc.edu
C. Philip Wood           cpw@lanl.gov
Jessica (Jie Yun) Yu     jyy@merit.edu

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