Re: Whitepaper on XML-based Network Management

[Phil Shafer <phil@trip.juniper.net>]

A bit of followup.....

From my discussions with network operators and their internal tools
groups, the concensus is basically:

- SNMP is great for simple jobs, but gets cumbersome and inefficient
for more complex tasks. Comments on ops-nm echo this.
- Expect is the tool of choice for a large number of tasks, but
the lack of control and variability of the responses mean that scripts
are too fragile and maintenance costs are too large.

XML-based Network Management (XNM?) gives a better solution than Expect
for parsing data emitted by a network device, since it provides both an
exact description of the data being transmitted and a compatibility
mechanism for handling future (and past) versions of software. It can
handle complex datasets and hierarchical relationships.

XNM gives tools developer (internal, public, and commercial) the
ability to handle complex data with standard programming libraries
and to build on the shoulders of the fresh crop of XML technologies.
For example, XSLT allows a vendor-neutral configuration file to be
converted into a vendor-specific one. Once a definition is made
for vendor-neutral configuration, vendors can provide the XSLT
transformations to make vendor-specific configuration files.

Most of the customers I've talked with have their own tools group;
most avoid commercial tools because of version and feature lag. They
are excited about the possibilities this technology holds. Some folks
are already using XML internally, and see expanded use in their
future. 

So the question is: Is my sample of network operators off by more than
one standard deviation? It's likely skewed toward larger operators,
but are the above readings representative of the operator community?
How far off the mark am I?

Thanks,
 Phil