IP Flow Export BOF (ipfx) Thursday, August 09 at 0900-1130 ================================= CHAIRS: Nevil Brownlee Dave Plonka AGENDA: 1. Agenda bashing. 2. Discussion of IPFX Requirements Starting with Internet Draft: draft-quittek-ipfx-req-01.txt (published June 2001) 3. Current state of IP flow export To what extent can we separate the definition of flows from the transport mechanism for flow data? 4. Discussion of charter, goals & milestones for the proposed new IPFX Working Group. Relationship of IPFX to other IETF Working Groups 5. Discussion of work items raised in the charter discussion. 6. If time allows: brief (5~10 minutes) presentations of existing and proposed Flow Export systems. Mailing Lists: General Discussion: ipfx@net.doit.wisc.edu To Subscribe: majordomo@net.doit.wisc.edu with "subscribe ipfx" in message body Archive: http://ipfx.doit.wisc.edu/ Description of Working Group: There is a need in industry and the Internet research community for IP devices such as routers to export flow information in a standard way to external systems such as mediation systems, accounting/billing systems, and network management systems to facilitate services such as measurement, accounting, and billing. This group will define a protocol by which IP flow information can be transferred in a timely fashion from an "exporter" to a collection station or stations. The "exporter", which is typically an IP router or IP traffic measurement device, will employ the IP flow export protocol to report "IP flows", these being series of related IP packets that have been either forwarded or dropped. The reported flow details will include both (1) those attributes derived from the IP packet headers such as source and destination address, protocol, and port number and (2) those attributes often known only to an IP router such as timestamps, ingress and egress ports, IP (sub)net mask, and autonomous system numbers. In doing so, the group has the following specific goals: o Devise a protocol that provides a flexible but specialized, high performance, online IP Flow export capability which meets the work-load, reliability and timeliness requirements of existing applications that rely on IP flow export. o Define the notion of a "standard IP flow" within the protocol specification. The flow definition will be a practical one, similar to those currently in use by existing non-standard flow export protocols which have attempted to acheive similar goals but have not documented their flow defintion. o Devise data encodings that support analysis of MPLS, IPv4 and IPv6 unicast and multicast flows traversing a network element at packet header level and other levels of aggregation as requested by the network operator according to the capabilities of the given router implementation. o Ensure that the protocol is reasonable to implement by router and instrumentation developers and is easy to deploy by network operators. o Design the protocol to be reliable in that it will minimize the likelihood of flow data being lost and to accurately report such loss if it occurs. This may involve supporting the use of firewall/proxy between network element and collectors as well as load balance amongst multiple collectors. o Consider the notion of IP flow export based upon packet sampling. Goals and Milestones: Jun 2001 Request BOF at IETF 51 in London. BOF would discuss the charter, continue the requirements discussion, and begin discussion on Transport Layer protocol and Data encoding model. Late Jun 2001 Submit Internet-Draft on IP Flow Export Requirements IPFX-REQUIREMENTS Late Sep 2001 Submit Revised Internet-Draft on IP Flow Export Requirements IPFX-REQUIREMENTS Early Feb 2002 Submit IPFX-REQUIREMENTS to IESG for publication, Informational RFC Submit Internet-Draft on IP Flow Export Protocol IPFX-PROTOCOL Submit Internet-Draft on IP Flow Export Data Model IPFX-DATAMODEL Early May 2002 Submit IPFX-DATAMODEL to IESG for publication, Informational RFC Submit IPFX-PROTOCOL to IESG for publication, Proposed Standard RFC (also need an Applicability Statement RFC)