COMP2106

Advanced Network Management

Module 6

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Objectives
By the end of this lesson, you will be able
to:
Explain what a Management Information Base
(MIB) is and what is contained in it
Differentiate between management
information, its specification and metamodels
Describe how an SNMP MIB is defined
Understand how design can be applied to the
modeling of management information
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Management
Conversations

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Management
Conversations

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MIB
Management Information Base
Maintained by the agents

Managers retrieve information from the MIB

MIBs store a conceptual view of a Managed a
Object
A floor plan is a conceptual view of a building
The floors and rooms in the building store the real
world objects

A manager gets information from the agent

based on the floor plan, such as how many
people are in that room
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MIB Practical
Type of interface Example
Interface can report status (up or down)
Total number of packets Tx or Rx
Highest number of packets Tx in the past
hour
Percentage of CPU utilization
Type of memory and utilization
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Address Hierarchy
Country

CA

Montre
al

City

Toronto

Avenue
Rd.

Main
St.

Street

Number123

654

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Rue
Dorval

1024

MIB Hierarchy
Managed
Objects

Agent

Chassi
s

MIB

Cards
per
chassi
s

Ports
per card

Management Plane

Real Resources

Real Resource Plane

(Router, Switch,
Server, Application,
etc.)

Managed
Entity

Chassi
s

Cards
per
chassi
s

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Ports
per card
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Management Information
Categories
State
Functional or not, performance, connectivity, etc.

Historical
Snapshots of performance, packet counts,
temperature (in intervals over 24 hours)

Physical Configuration
Device type, cards and available ports

Logical Configuration
Parameter settings
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SMI
Structure of Management Information
An adapted subset of ASN.1
Used for SNMP
Defines modules of related managed objects in a MIB
IETF RFC 1155 (SMI v2 RFC 2578
MIB-2 defined in RFC 1213
Superset of MIB-1 for use specifically with systems that use the
TCP-IP protocol

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MIB OID Tree (MIB 2

std)
root

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MIB OID Tree (Cisco)

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MIB OID Tree

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ASN.1 Example

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MIB example
sysDescr OBJECT-TYPE
SYNTAX DisplayString (SIZE (0..255))
ACCESS read-only
STATUS mandatory
DESCRIPTION
A textual description of the entity. This value should include the full
name and version
identification of the systems hardware type, software operating-system,
and networking
software. It is mandatory that this only contain printable ASCII
characters.
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MIB attributes
Syntax essentially defines the data type. sysDescr and sysContact
are strings with a maximum length of 255 characters; sysUpTime is of a
type TimeTicks. TimeTicks is a textual convention that is defined in an
imported specification;

Access specifies whether the object is a parameter that can be set

by a manager (read-write) or whether it can only be read, such as
when the object contains state information

Status refers to the definition lifecycle. In the example, the status

of every object is mandatory, meaning that every implementation of
the MIB module must include it. The other value is optional.
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Chapter 7
Management Communication
Patterns: Rules of Conversation

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Topics
Different Layers of Management interface
Polling based vs. Event based Management
Important management interface caps
Differences between management and
database transactions
Categories of Management events
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Management Interaction : Layers

Application Layer
Examples are e-mail (SMTP), file transfer
(FTP)
Network Management is an important
app
Can be divided into sublayers

Management services
Management operations
Remote Operations
Transport
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Transport Layer
Layer 4 of the OSI reference model
Transport protocols generally used
UDP
TCP
BEEP
Certain parts of SSH and HTTP

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Remote Operations
Three distinct functions
Association Control
Establish and tear down management sessions

Remote Operations support (RPC)

Wrap and delineate management requests and
responses
Managing request/response ids
Fragmentation and reassembly of PDUs

Data encoding
Putting the management information in a PDU
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Management
Provides actual Operations
management primitives
Management requests
Agent responses
Events

Specific primitives depend on the

management protocol being used
Types of primitives
Read, Write, Event reporting, Actions,
Acknowledgements (not common)
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Management
Services
Combine the primitives provided at the
management operations layer with
additional capabilities
Example
Remote scheduling service that allows
management applications to set up a probe that
periodically executes a management operation at
certain times without requiring the management
application to issue a new request each time
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Requests and
Typical parts of Responses
a request
Type of request
Management info the request applies to
Additional housekeeping info
Authentication info
Request Id

Typical parts of a response

Response code
Information requested if request was successful
Addl housekeeping info
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Polling based Management

Manager obtains information by sending
a request to agent known as polling
Types of management information
retrieved
Configuration information
Operational data and state information
Bulk requests and incremental operations
Historical information
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Event based Management

Initiated by Agent
An event message is sent to bring it to the attention
of the manager that an event has occurred at the
Agent
Types of events
Alarms
Configuration changes
Threshold crossing alerts
Logging events
Informational events
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Event message info

Any event message includes following
info
System (agent) Id
Time stamp(s)
Type of event
Event details
Additional info such as sequence number,
specific information associated with
certain events
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Polling Vs. Event message

Aspects to be looked into
Number of required communication
exchanges for a given task
Timeliness
Request processing capacity on the
managed device
Wastefulness
Available management bandwidth
Management application scale
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