[Idr] combining drafts SOFT-NOTIFY, INFORM and ADVISORY

["Ilya Varlashkin" <Ilya.Varlashkin at de.easynet.net>]

Hi,

operating mid-sized network that spans the globe I see good value in
having at hands additional info to why certain BGP-related events took
place. All three drafts (SOFT-NOTIFY, INFORM and ADVISORY) can provide
this info and in my opinion should be considered for further refinement
within IDR. In my experience more often than not NOC folk try to
determine "did this session go down because something broke on our side?
on peer side? did peer close session because of planned or emergency
work? or was is inconsistent configuration between two sides?". Based on
the same experience if broken session was result of human intervention I
doubt that involved person would write significantly more useful info
than automatically generated message could provide. Yes they could write
"taking this session down because we need to replace line card", but
they're likely just to write "emergency work" if anything at all. On the
other hand, router's software could generate predefined message and send
it to peer if user action will result in session reset or shut down.
This would be both easier for the side performing work (they don't need
to type much), and benefical for the peer (they know at least state
change was due to user action on the other side). Additional free-text
message would be welcome, but not mandatory.

SOFT-NOTIFY draft provides good foundation for implementing automation
part of what's described above. Integrating ADVISORY draft functionality
into SOFT-NOTIFY (via new or existing TLV) could provide additional info
to operators. For example, if I shutdown session(s) before
planned/emergency work on the router by issuing "set neighbor X
shutdown', then router can send SOFT-NOTIFY message to the peer "session
shut down on operator request" (probably in standard encoded rather than
free-text form). If I'm nice operator I could provide additional info to
peer by using optional argument to the above command: "set neighbor X
shutdown 'emergency work. restore eta 15min". This messages could then
be retreived by peer's NOC when they do 'show bgp neighbor X' and will
save both sides effort of handling emails to clarify situation. Even if
the operator doesn't provide extra free-form info, the auto-generated by
router message would already indicate to NOC that session was brought
down intentionally. Details of whether to provide such functionality as
sticky messages could be worked out during draft refinement process.

I would support a draft that adds above described functionality but only
as integrated solution rather than separate drafts for automated
router-generated notifications and human-written text. Additionally, I
think free-form text should not be limited to ASCII-only english letters
but instead should either use unicode or be at least 8-bit transparent
(based on previous experience in non-latin environment).

Could we, idr wg, not merge all three mentioned drafts into single one
for combined functionality? 

Cheers,
iLya