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Goodbye SNMP? Hello, WS-Management
Laoping writes "News.com has a story about a new Web services management specification designed to simplify network administration across a wide range of devices. A bunch of a big tech companies developed it together (Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Dell and Sun). Microsoft will build support for WS-Management into an update to Windows Server, which is due late next year, and in the version of its Microsoft Operations Manager management software due in 2006. The .PDF release, that makes it clear that it is meant to be a Simple Network Management Protocol killer. Now I am all for a replacement for SNMP, but is this the way go?"
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Maybe it will be OK, if it uses persistent HTTP connections, which allow several requests and replies before terminating the transaction. Otherwise the ancient HTTP/1.0 message model is too limited to map all the messaging topology to the spectrum of object management requirements.
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make install -not war
The SNMP MIB tree is hierarchical. For example, the "version" parameter of NET-SNMP can be found by querying:
Furthermore, these names have corresponding OID numbers, which are universally unique.
So why not just add builtin event notification to snmp?
What, like SNMP traps?
Come on.. this stuff ain't new. :)
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
This has probably been covered elsewhere, but I found that Tim Bray's short essay on WS-Overload summed it up better than I could have:
Worth a look: http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/09/18/WS-Nobody else seemed to mention this yet so I thought I'd point out that Sun seems to be contradicting their latest monitoring framework:
JMX
By going along with this new specification. Network Management, monitoring, and other SNMP-like operations in Java are moving to the JMX or java media extension framework. In Java 5, the VM has JMX hooks built in for monitoring and control. Alas, I have to agree that SNMP is tired and old, but it still is in place in a lot of environments (and in routers, firewalls, and other hardware appliances) and is really easy to interface and use. I doubt this will catch on very quickly...
.: 2+2 = PI SQRT(1+N)
Ok, lets try to summarize why we like SNMP:
-Implementations can fit in a few kb memory footprint. I don't see web services beating that any time soon. (Oh, and not all the devices on the planet are 4Ghz P4's with a gigabyte of ram so it is still important not to be a memory hog on many areas).
-For relatively simple purposes, S(imple)NMP is almost as simple as it gets. Like say, for the monitoring of the temperature of a router, using something like web services would surely be overkill.
-There are many implementations for your favorite unix flavor. Probably best is the excelent net-snmp package. The 5.x version has many new methods of extending the main agent instrumentation through compiled in modules, dynamicaly loadable modules, external (pass) scripts, even embedded perl. Solaris 10 will be using the net-snmp package as part of the standard installation.
-The protocol is extremely efficient so there is little presure on the underlying medium. The PDU's are encoded in BER, so the implementations are abundant and quite standard. And yes, this is very very important because practicaly all versions of agents and toolkits are 100% compatible between them.
-Because the SMI is defined in ASN.1, there is no ambiguity in the structure of the management information. See previous bullet why this is important.
-There are excellent tools like HP OpenView NNM which can really simplify monitoring of even extremely large networks.
Now let's see some of its disadvantages:
-Poor security, corrected in version 3 (somewhat complex) but still most people use version 1 or 2c.
-Setable objects are IMHO a nightmare to use. For those of you who are reloading their router by setting sysUpTime to 0, I may seem dead wrong, but it appears that most people's safe bet would be just to log in to the machine and do the job they want. To generalize that idea, SNMP is unbeatable when it comes to monitoring things, but when it comes to actualy controlling things from away, it loses. Perhaps that is exactly the niche that those web services will complement (not replace!) SNMP.
-Extremely difficult to describe complex data structures using SMI. But then again I may be too impatient.
Lastly, though it will sound bitter, there is no clear evidence that web services or WBEM or whatever will be able to actualy help network administrators do their job better than they do it today.
And remember everyone, there is no big company that can necessarily know your job and your needs better than you, as much as they profess to. So on this matter we must not take the word of those who are trying to sell us the New Management Ubertool but on the contrary try to evaluate it in the real world and figure out if it actualy is usefull or not.
And that's my five cents for tonight.
I disagree.. the specification itself is so complex it's very rare to find someone who implemented it from scratch. That's why whenever there is a SNMP security avisory it tends to affect many vendors.
Insightful? To me insightful would require actually having read the specification.
If you look at the spec, you'll see the answer to this question.