Computing MIB views via delegated agents

Network management applications typically need to extract useful information from raw MIB data. At present, they must poll this data from embedded SNMP agents and compute the information of interest at a remote management platform. In a growing number of scenarios this is either impossible or impractical. This problem could be resolved if the application could execute computations at the agent that would generate and retrieve an atomic snapshot. We present several examples that illustrate the need for mechanisms to support effective MIB computations at element agents, and describe mechanisms to support MIB computations specified in a View Definition Language. View programs are dispatched to and executed at an SNMP agent environment, and their results are organized in SNMP MIBs. This approach enables managers to program agents, yet requires no changes to the SNMP protocol.