Introduction
Management solutions and applications available in the market today tends to inject or in fact flood networks and network devices with many SNMP MIB object requests through SNMP Get-Next and even Get-Bulk operations. Such flooding of management information has proven to be very costly as it has been a major reason for (breaking!) network devices (Core devices included) and for congesting major links!
Another very important observation largely overlooked by administrators and MIS managers is the fact that management traffic is the lowest priority processed traffic within the network; this means that management traffic is the first to be dropped whenever a link or a device are overloaded by the very same traffic that is supposed to manage the network devices and resources! Actually in the midst of all of this the priority (derived from importance and value) of the management traffic itself over other management traffic is never addressed! To take this a layer deeper; which management traffic has more weight to the administrator or the organization when compared to other management traffic and at which time or on which network resource, service, and/or set of events?
Plenty of open questions all however converge on addressing the issue of scalability of network management traffic. It is very important to control the type and the amount of traffic managing network resources, services, and/or set of events without exhausting or compromising those very network resources, services, and/or set of events.
An example of such MIB Objects is the RFC1213 ifAdminStatus object. This object is being polled today by tens of management solutions and applications, a typical report output would then display the administrative status of ALL the interfaces polled and there could be tens of them on each device polled.
No NMS application available in the market today and indeed known to us tests the value of the ifAdminStatus to verify that it is in the ‘UP’ state before reporting on any other data pertaining to the corresponding interface.
It is indeed logical to ONLY manage an interface that is set to the ‘UP’ state (or at least interfaces NOT set to the ‘DOWN’ state) by the human administrator and avoid wasting of management infrastructure resources.
Solution Overview
This management solution focuses on managing ONLY Ethernet type interfaces that are NOT in a down administrative state as is set by the network administrator on the managed network devices.
The solution defines a module name and description, then initiates the polling process under which the Devices in the specified AMZ are fed into the polling SNMP engine, where the interfaces descriptions ifDescr MIB Objects are polled and mapped to their corresponding interfaces indexes. A variable handler is then defined to store the values of the polled ifAdminStatus MIB Object which is then tested with an IF conditional statement; if the status for the particular interface is NOT ‘down’ then another variable handler is defined to store the values of the polled ifType MIB Object. ifTypeVar handler is then tested with an IF conditional statement to determine if the interface is an IANA ethernetCsmacd type interface. If true then ifType, ifAlias, ifSpeed, and ifMTU MIB Objects are then polled for that interface and again on all devices of the specified AMZ every 5 minutes.
On average; we expect that our SOSL based management scripts and processes will use between 10 to 25 % of the total traffic injected in the network compared to well known NMS products managing the same type of information below.
SOSL Based Management Process Script Configuration
MODULE ScalabilityMgmt();
DESCRIPTION "Scaling interface management information";
BEGIN
POLL-FREQ
{
ALL-DEV (ZONE "LondonNet") BY DEV
{
SET-INDEX ifTable ( ifDescr [ ifIndex, INT ] );
WITH-INDEX ifTable
{
DEFINE ifAdminStatusVar DISPL;
ifAdminStatusVar = POLL (ifAdminStatus);
IF ( ifAdminStatus != "^down$")
THEN
DEFINE ifTypeVar DISPL;
ifTypeVar = POLL (ifType);
IF ( ifTypeVar == "^ethernetCsmacd$")
THEN
POLL (ifAlias; ifSpeed; ifMTU);
ENDIF;
ENDIF;
};
};
WAIT (3000);
};
END
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