Re: host-resources

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>]

>>>>> Harrington, David writes:

Dave> I'm working to standardize how our company presents information
Dave> about memory, CPUs, etc. Host-Resources MIB contains this info,
Dave> but it is designed for host management, and it is very
Dave> ambiguous. Is there a better standard mib for representing HR
Dave> type information for a switch or router? Is there a BCP
Dave> someplace?

Personally, I prefer that systems implement RFC 2790 over proprietary
MIBs. I recently added code to display the running processes on Cisco
boxes that do not follow RFC 2790 and this is of course more work on
my side which I like to avoid. Perhaps someone from Cisco can explain
the reasons why there is a private CISCO-PROCESS-MIB - I can only
guess some potential reasons but I prefer to not do wild guessing in
public.

Dave> Which memory systems should be included in hrMemorySize? Should
Dave> we list every memory system on the board or only certain memory
Dave> systems?  Should the processors only represent the ones
Dave> responsible for management functions, or every CPU in the
Dave> system?

My understanding is that hrMemorySize is the total physical read-write
memory. I would expect that a good implementation reports all memory
systems in the hrStorageTable which is IMHO more important than
hrMemorySize. This also applies for processors - I would like to see
as many as there are. Of course, the definition of what is actually a
processor is by its nature somewhat fuzzy. The most problematic thing
wrt. processors is the notion of hrProcessorLoad which on host systems
does in general not match what users consider to be a CPU load
(usually reported as the exponentially smoothed average of the number
of runnable processes waiting for CPU).

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder		International University Bremen
Phone: +49 421 200 3587		P.O. Box 750 561, 28725 Bremen, Germany
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