Dr. Bobby Krupczak's slides about the Cartographer management agent and the underlying XMP management framework. Presented at the February 10, 2009 meeting of the Atlanta Network and Systems Management Technical User Group (ANSMTUG).

1. Cartographer or Building a Next Generation Management Framework Bobby Krupczak Chief Scientist Krupczak.org, LLC [email_address] http://www.krupczak.org/cartographer

3. Overview of network mgmt today

4. Cartographer

5. Yet another management framework

6. Software technology

7. Demo

9. Worked in industry on SNMP

10. MS CS GaTech 1993

11. Co-founder of Empire Technologies

12. PhD CS GaTech 1997

13. Sold Empire to Concord 1999

14. Krupczak.org 2003

16. Managers, agents exchange mgmt info

18. Alteration of

19. Creation of

20. Deletion of mgmt info

22. Heavyweight, complex, smart managers

23. Traditional command-control

24. Scaling becomes issue

25. Analogous to CEO managing entire enterprise

27. Empire/SystemEDGE, RMON

28. Increase scaling, reduce reaction time

29. Some delegation, middle-managers, remote pollers

30. Exception-management, event

31. de-duplication, root-cause

33. Distribution overhead and agent administrative footprint still non-trivial

34. SNMPv1, v2c, v3 now deployed

35. Agent backlash?

36. CEO now has bank VPs but still manage/controls the enterprise

38. Include network services as well as higher-layer abstractions

39. Agent based

40. Topography not topology

41. Others have examined this approach though mostly in academic research papers

43. Systems represented as vertexes

44. Dependencies represented as edges

45. Directed graphs

46. System is server if it provides service to some client

47. System is client if it consumes service

48. Example Dependency Graph

50. Diagnose and troubleshoot faults

51. Security spinoff

52. Monitor, test, & compare service experiences

53. Work bottom-up

55. Distributed systems are highly dynamic, not static

56. Automating management necessitates capturing this info and encoding it

59. Inbound/outbound/transit

60. Per-system, per-user, per-app

64. Given a client, what faults are affecting it?

67. Develop model of typical behavior/role of system/app

68. Deviations from baseline could indicate issues

72. Per-system active testing

76. P2P architecture utilized

77. Every agent acts in dual role

79. Run distributed algorithms

80. Self-propagate, self-update

82. Many p2p overlays

83. Increase scaling (unlimited?)

84. Reduce reaction time

85. Analyze more up-to-date info

86. Example P2P Overlay

88. SNMPvX still too cumbersome, inefficient

89. Protocol limitations

90. ASN.1/BER too brittle and prone to interoperability problems

94. Specification (MIBs)

97. More XML tools,

98. More widely adopted than ASN.1

100. Parsing

101. Conversion

104. Start with SNMP SMI

106. Tuple of MIB-name, object-name, key

109. Everything 64-bit min, although with XML, numbers can be larger w/o breaking 2/3 of framework

110. With BER, changing from 32-64 bit breaks SMIs, MIBs, software

113. Avoid use of inheritance and poloymorphism complexities (ala CIM)

114. Scalar and tabular objects

119. No need for MIB tricks

120. No need for object ordering

123. Also closes session

124. Stay connected as long as needed

128. Response (scalars, tables)

129. SetRequest (scalars)

131. Example GetRequest

132. Example Response

134. SelectTableRequest

135. InsertTableRequest

136. DeleteTableRequest

137. UpdateTableRequest

138. No overloading, no side-effects

139. Example SelectTableRequest

141. GetNext yields very little information and no additional semantics

143. In practice, walking only yields syntactic information

147. Cartographer utilizes its own CA to create/sign X509v3 certs

148. Each entity embeds own CA

149. Agent -> Agent requires two-way authentication

150. Manager does not need to provide cert

151. TCP/UDP 5270

153. Implemented MIB-2 in XMP

155. Tables, objects, keys

156. Borrow from relational DB theory and SQL

158. Within a MIB, object names must be unique

160. Cartographer MIB implemented

162. Closed source

166. Snort (dual license?)

167. Asterisk (dual license)

168. OpenNMS (OSS, services)

169. JBoss – sold for $400m to RedHat

170. MySQL – sold for $1B to Sun

173. MRTG

177. More likely than gateway approach

182. Solaris 9+ x86

183. Linux 2.4+ on x86 (32, 64-bit)

185. Pthreads

186. Openssl

187. Iconv, zlib

188. Big Picture

189. Agent Pieces/Parts

191. MIB-2 plugin, GPLv2

192. Example plugin, GPLv2

193. Cartographer plugin, closed source, shrinkwrap software license

194. Java GUI, closed source, shrinkwrap software license

195. See release notes and install instructions

198. MIB schema, SMI work

199. More MIB data

200. More intelligence

201. A lot more work on events

203. Distributed decision making

204. Root cause, impact

205. Automatic testing/measurement

206. More integration

207. Demo – Cartographer Main

208. Dependency View

209. Dependency Query

210. Dependency Query

211. Dependency Query (Asterisk)

212. Process Query

213. Process Query

214. Endpoint Query

215. Endpoint View

216. MRTG Integration

217. ONMS Integration