SNMP and OSI management information modeling and translation: a case study

The SNMP and OSI network management standards define two different languages and information models for describing management information. The advocacy of these different approaches is often driven by politics, religion and history as much as by technical considerations. We hope to remain aloof from these partisan arguments and to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the models from the point of view of human managers and of implementors. Comparisons in the literature often focus on performance aspects; load on networks and managed systems, memory requirements, etc. The main focus of our paper is on the information models themselves. Our approach is to explore how the same management information would be modeled within the OSI and SNMP standards. We then assess the results from the point of view of the "naturalness" of the modeling, its extensibility and its likely impact on the efficiency of management interactions. In some networking environments-especially in telecommunications-the OSI and SNMP standards must co-exist. The Network Management Forum (NMF) has defined a series of guidelines concerning coexistence and these include a methodology for translating between information models. We also attempt to assess the effectiveness of the NMF translation rules.