Network Working Group                                            V. Cerf
Request for Comments:  1109                                          NRI
                                                             August 1989


      Report of the Second Ad Hoc Network Management Review Group



Status of this Memo

   This RFC reports an official Internet Activities Board (IAB) policy
   position on the treatment of Network Management in the Internet. This
   RFC presents the results and recommendations of the second Ad Hoc
   Network Management Review on June 12, 1989.  The results of the first
   such meeting were reported in RFC 1052 [1].  This report was approved
   and its recommendations adopted by the IAB as assembled on July 11-
   13, 1989.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

INTRODUCTION

   On February 29, 1988, an Ad Hoc Network Management Review Group was
   convened to consider the state of network management technology for
   the Internet and to make recommendations to the Internet Activities
   Board as to network management policy.  The outcome of that meeting
   was summarized in RFC 1052 and essentially established a framework in
   which two network management protocols now known respectively as
   Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Common Management
   Information Protocol on TCP (CMOT) were selected for further work.
   Subsequently, both SNMP [6] and CMOT [5] were advanced to Draft-
   Standard/Recommended status for use in the Internet [SNMP: RFC 1098,
   CMOT: RFC 1095].

   Simultaneously, it was agreed to establish a working group to
   coordinate the definition and specification of managed objects to be
   used in common with either protocol.  In addition, it was agreed to
   use the then current ISO Structure of Management Information (SMI)
   specification as a reference standard to guide the naming and
   abstraction conventions that would be followed in constructing the
   common Internet Management Information Base (MIB).  The Internet
   versions of SMI and MIB were specified in RFC 1065 [2] and RFC 1066
   [3] respectively.

   In the intervening fifteen months, considerable progress has been
   made in the specification of a common Management Information Base and
   in the implementation, deployment and use of network management tools
   in the Internet.





 
RFC 1109                  Internet Management                August 1989


   The current public subtree of the Internet MIB contains roughly 100
   variables (i.e., managed objects) agreed by the SNMP and CMOT working
   groups as mandatory for Internet network management.  The June 12,
   1989 meeting which this document reports was convened to review the
   progress to date, to determine whether actions were needed to foster
   further evolution of network management tools and to recommend
   specific actions in this area to the IAB.

SNMP STATUS

   Immediately after the meeting reported in RFC 1052, a group was
   convened to make extensions and changes to the predecessor to SNMP:
   Simple Gateway Monitoring Protocol.  A "connectathon" was held at
   NYSERNet, an RFC published, and demonstrations of network management
   tools using SNMP were offered in the Fall at Interop 88 [a conference
   and show presented by Advanced Computing Environments (ACE)].  The
   protocol is in use in a number of networks within the Internet as
   well as in private packet networks internationally.  A number of
   vendor implementations are in the field (e.g., cisco Systems,
   Proteon, The Wollongong Group), vendor independent reference
   implementations (e.g., NYSERNet, Case and Key in Tennessee) along
   with some freely available versions (e.g., MIT, CMU).

   It is important to note that while the common Internet Management
   Information Base has roughly 100 variables, a typical SNMP monitoring
   system may support anywhere from 100 to 200 ADDITIONAL objects which
   have been defined in private or experimental MIB space.  Many of
   these are device or protocol dependent variables.

   Scaling to include larger numbers of monitored objects and subsystems
   remains a challenge.  It was observed that fault monitoring was
   easier to scale than performance and configuration monitoring, since
   the former may operate on an exception basis while the latter is more
   likely to require periodic reporting.

CMOT STATUS

   RFC 1095 (CMOT) was recently published and built upon experience