Prototyping Web Services based Network Monitoring

Web services is one of the emerging approaches in network management. This paper describes the design and implementation of four Web services based network monitoring prototypes. Each prototype follows a specific approach to retrieve management data, ranging from retrieving a single management data object, to retrieving an entire table of such objects at once. We have focused on the interfaces table (ifTable), as described in the IF-MIB. This paper also provides some preliminary measurement results, showing the amount of bandwidth required by our prototypes, the effect of compression of the management data, and the effect of having more management data objects. It turns out that the bandwidth usage without compression is between 1 Kbyte to retrieve a single data object, up to 4.2 Kbyte to retrieve the entire ifTable. Compression, however, reduces these numbers significantly: up to 87% less bandwidth usage. Keywords— Web services, performance, network management.