Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
Challenges and Experiences in Transitioning
Management Instrumentation from Command-Oriented
to Model-Driven
Sean McGuiness, Jung Tjong, Prakash Bettadapur
Cisco Systems Inc,
170 West Tasman Drive,
San Jose, CA 95134-1706, USA
{smcguine, jtjong, pbettada
}@cisco.com
Abstract.
The popularity of model-driven development has grown
significantly in recent years pushing its rapid adoption in the
management instrumentation space. While standards and tooling have
been created for virgin management instrumentation applications, little
has been done to address the challenges of transitioning existing
applications into the model-driven arena. With management interfaces
constructed with divergent stovepipe implementations to meet their
differing requirements and data characteristics, moving the entire
system to a model-driven environment is an expensive and impractical
proposition. Discussed are the design challenges and implementation
experiences encountered during the successful transition of a legacy
management
instrumentation
system
to
a
model-driven
system,
including major design choices and the rationale behind them.
Keywords: Management, instrumentation, modeling, command-
oriented, design, development, CLI, SNMP, MIB, legacy,
transition
1 Introduction
Historically, much of network management instrumentation has revolved
around command-oriented interfaces. As Model-Driven Engineering (MDE)
has gained popularity in the management instrumentation community,
designers are looking to transition existing command-oriented management
instrumentation applications to MDE-based designs. Transitioning systems
where targeted commands have been constructed to directly manipulate or
