Evaluating the Performance of SNMP and Web Services Notifications

Web services against SNMP comparisons have been carried out by the network management community in order to understand the impact on adopting Web services as a management tool. In these comparisons, however, notification messages have been neglected to a secondary plane in such a way that the current conclusions about the performance of Web services may not apply for networks extensively managed via notifications. In this paper we first evaluate the performance of Web services notifications encoded following the WS-notification specification, and compare it with the performance of SNMP traps. Then, we introduce a configurable SNMP to Web services gateway that reacts to SNMP traps on behalf of an SNMP manager, retrieves further information from the notifying entity, and builds up WS-notification compliant messages which are sent to Web services-based managers. We finally evaluate the performance of the proposed solution in order to redraw the current conclusions about Web services against SNMP, now explicitly considering the also important notification support