MPLS-Enabled Applications: Emerging Developments and New Technologies

13.2. MANAGEMENT - WHY AND WHAT

From the provider's point of view, management is a broad definition of all the aspects that allow him to offer, deploy and bill for a service. This includes provisioning the service, detecting and isolating failures, avoiding downtime and accounting for billing purposes. The availability of tools for accomplishing these tasks and the capabilities of such tools affect the costs incurred for deploying the service and the revenue that can be derived from it. Good tools can ease the provisioning process, reduce the troubleshooting time when a fault occurs and provide granular accounting.

Management is a broad topic that could easily be the subject of an entire book. In this chapter, we focus on the router functionality that provides the necessary information and the basic tools for managing both the MPLS infrastructure and the services enabled by it. Some of this functionality, such as many accounting features, was added by vendors following customer demand and is specific to a given implementation. Other functionality, such as LSP ping, was defined in the IETF as new protocol machinery that routers must implement.

Because management is such an important piece of any proposed solution, work is done in this area in each and every one of the IETF working groups. In fact, a document cannot advance in the standards track in the IETF without having the appropriate management support, for example, in the form of an SNMP Management Information Base (MIB). ...