RRFW Working Draft: Service uptime monitoring and reporting

Status: in pre-design phase. Date: Sep 26 2003; Last revised:

Definitions

It is often required to monitor the service level in networks. Service level is normally covered by Service Level Agreement (SLA), which defines the following parameters:

• Service definition

  Describes the particular service in terms of functionality and means of monitoring. Examples are: IP VPN connectivity, WAN uplink, SQL database engine.

• Maintenance window

  Describes the periodic time intervals when service outage is possible due to some maintenance work. It may be unconditional (outage is always possible within the window), or conditional (customer confirmation required for outage within the window). Notification period is normally defined for maintenance outages. Example: every 1st Tuesday of the month between 6AM and 8 AM, with 96 hours notification time.

• Outage types

  Outages may be caused by: 1). system failure; 2). service provider's infrastructure failure; 3). customer activity.

• Service level objectives

  These are the guarantees that the sevice provider gives to the customer. Violation of these guarantees is compensated by penalties defined.

  These may include: Maxium maintenance downtime per specified period; Maximum downtime period due to failures on the service provider side; Minimum service availability per specified period.

Event datasource type

In order to store the service level information, we need a new datasource type in RRFW: event. It represents an atomic information about a single event in time, e.g. it canot be devided into more specific elements or sub-events. Its attributes are as follows:

• Event group name

  Several events belong to one and only one group. Event group is a unique entity that describes the service.

• Event name

  Unique name within the event group. Describes the type of the event, such as maintenance, downtime. Events with the same names cannot overlap in time.

• Start time

  Timestamp of the event start.

• Duration

  Positive integer that specifies the length of the event in seconds. Zero duration means that the event has not yet finished.

• Parameters

  Event-specific (name, value) pairs.

Events are uniquely identified by (Event group, Event name, Start time) triple.

Event summary reports

Renderer should be able to display the events at different summary levels and in different combinations. Event reports should be specified by expressions, as follows:

• Boolean operators

  downtime AND NOT maintenance.

• Time period

  (downtime AND NOT maintenance)[-2DAYS,NOW]

  (downtime[-2DAYS,NOW] AND NOT maintenance AND NOT downtime[200309151200,200309151300])

• Arithmetic operations

  Sum of durations, substract of durations...

Events generation

Events may be generated by the following sources:

• Collector

  SNMP collector may create events on some faulty conditions, like host unreachable, or on SNMP variables change, like interface status. Also it's possible to create an ICMP Echo collector type, which would generate events based on pinging the hosts.

• Monitor

  Obviously, a new monitor action will be to create events.

• Human operator

  First from commandline interface, and later from thr Web interface, the human operators may create the scheduled events, like maintenance outages. Security policy should protect certain types of events from human intervention.

Author

Copyright (c) 2003 Stanislav Sinyagin <ssinyagin@k-open.com>