The OSI network management model

It is useful to reconsider the central questions of network management: What should be monitored? How should it be interpreted? How should this analysis be used to control the network behavior? Management protocol standards provide syntactic structures to organize and access managed information. Such a syntactic framework can be useful in enabling systematic answers to these questions. However, the semantics of managed information, rather than its syntax, is the key to the answers. Clearly, the data that should be monitored needs to be derived from the model that is used to interpret the data. The model must be based on the semantics of the network operational behavior. Unfortunately, the manner in which interactions among network processes lead to faults or performance inefficiencies is not well understood. Significant research is needed to develop improved understanding of network operations and to build effective manageability. Standardization of managed information syntax is best viewed as a first step toward handling the semantics of network operations. Network management needs and scenarios are likely to continue and change as new types of networks, new applications, and better management technologies arise throughout the coming decade. As our understanding of the semantics of operations improves, new syntactic structures to support manageability will continue to emerge. Standardization of these mechanisms likely will continue and evolve in a manner not asimilar to the SNMP´s evolution.