Re: SNMP improvements

[Dinakaran Joseph <dinakar@us.ibm.com>]

Andy Bierman wrote :

> >If I sound pessimistic, it's because I am.  We've burned our bridges
> >before we've even crossed the ravine, and the bridge forward isn't
> >fully built.  I'm confident that we'll be ok in the distant future, as
> >the netconf work is on a good track.  It's the years until then that
> >I'm concerned about.

> I don't share your pessimism.  First of all, the significant
> changes to SNMP and SMI that didn't happen in the EOS and SMING
> WGs would have taken years to finish and deploy.  Also, I
> don't understand why "fixing" SNMP is so important anyway.
> The industry has decided SNMP is good for monitoring and
> notifications, and it does a great job in both cases.  I don't
> see any compelling need to make significant changes to
> the SMI or SNMP for these tasks.  I think SNMP applications
> will coexist with NETCONF applications for many years to come.

Agreed, SNMP is predominantly used for monitoring but in some situations
even that is becoming difficult. When there is a huge amount of data to
retrieve back from the agent (which is not very uncommon) it is not very
efficient and users are looking at getting the monitoring data in different
ways other than SNMP. Wes Hardakers draft tried to solve these problems. If
the IETF is taking a stand that SNMP should be used for monitoring then the
problems need to be fixed.

/Dinakaran.