IPFIX Working Group B. Trammell
Internet-Draft ETH Zurich
Intended status: BCP B. Claise
Expires: April 6, 2013 Cisco Systems, Inc.
October 3, 2012
Guidelines for Authors and Reviewers of IPFIX Information Elements
draft-ietf-ipfix-ie-doctors-07.txt
Abstract
This document provides guidelines for how to write definitions of new
Information Elements for the IP Flow Information Export (IPFIX)
protocol. It provides instructions on using the proper conventions
for Information Elements to be registered in the IANA IPFIX
Information Element registry, and provides guidelines for expert
reviewers to evaluate new registrations.
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on April 6, 2013.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2012 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
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Internet-Draft IPFIX IE-DOCTORS October 2012
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.1. Intended Audience and Usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2. Overview of relevant IPFIX documents . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. How to apply IPFIX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Defining new Information Elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.1. Information Element naming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.2. Information Element data types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.3. Information Element numbering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.4. Ancillary Information Element properties . . . . . . . . . 10
4.5. Internal structure in Information Elements . . . . . . . . 10
4.6. Information Element multiplicity . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4.7. Enumerated Values and Subregistries . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4.8. Reversibility as per RFC 5103 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4.9. Avoiding Bad Ideas in Information Element Design . . . . . 13
5. The Information Element Lifecycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5.1. The IE-DOCTORS process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5.2. Revising Information Elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5.3. Deprecating Information Elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
6. When not to define new Information Elements . . . . . . . . . 17
6.1. Maximizing reuse of existing Information Elements . . . . 17
6.2. Applying enterprise-specific Information Elements . . . . 19
7. Information Element Definition Checklist . . . . . . . . . . . 19
8. Applying IPFIX to non-Flow Applications . . . . . . . . . . . 22
9. Writing Internet-Drafts for IPFIX Applications . . . . . . . . 22
9.1. Example Information Element Definition . . . . . . . . . . 23
9.2. Defining Recommended Templates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
10. A Textual Format for Specifying Information Elements and
Templates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
10.1. Information Element Specifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
10.2. Specifying Templates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
10.3. Specifying IPFIX Structured Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
11. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
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