Early Review of draft-ietf-ippm-alt-mark-deployment-05
review-ietf-ippm-alt-mark-deployment-05-opsdir-early-min-2026-06-04-00

Hi,

I have been selected as the Operational Directorate (opsdir) reviewer for this
Internet-Draft.

The Operational Directorate reviews all operational and management-related
Internet-Drafts to ensure alignment with operational best practices and that
adequate operational considerations are covered.

A complete set of _"Guidelines for Considering Operations and Management in
IETF Specifications"_ can be found at
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-opsawg-rfc5706bis/.

While these comments are primarily for the Operations and Management Area
Directors (Ops ADs), the authors should consider them alongside other feedback
received.

- Document: draft-ietf-ippm-alt-mark-deployment-05

- Reviewer: Xiao Min

- Review Date: Jun 5, 2026

- Intended Status: Informational

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## Summary

This document is basically ready for publication but has minor issues and nits
that should be considered prior to publication.

## General Operational Comments Alignment with RFC 5706bis

This document covers various aspects about Alternate Marking deployment and all
kinds of considerations on Operations and Management while applying Alternate
Marking method to encapsulation protocols. The coverage is very comprehensive
and no omission found by me.

Also note that for section 7 Data Export, the only data export protocol used in
the existing Alternate Marking implementation I know of is gRPC, which is not
an IETF protocol and not mentioned in this section, so I'll let others who are
familiar with the mentioned data export protocols (IPFIX, YANG Push, and Hybrid
Two-Step) to review this section in details.

## Major Issues

None.

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## Minor Issues

* Section 8.7 can be removed and the reference of
draft-zhou-ippm-enhanced-alternate-marking can be added into section 8.1,
because the enhancement described in that draft only applies to IPv6. In
addition, in section 8.1 draft-wang-ippm-ipv6-flow-measurement is referenced as
an alternative to RFC 9343, however that draft is actually an enhancement to
RFC 9343, just like draft-zhou-ippm-enhanced-alternate-marking.

* I don't understand the logic why RFC 9343 is listed as a normative reference
while all other documents defining encapsulation protocols for Alternate
Marking are listed as informative references. IMHO all of them should be
treated equally.

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## Nits

Section 1, s/Multipoint Alternate Marking [RFC9342]/Clustered Alternate-Marking
Method [RFC9342].

Section 3, it says
      "A marking node, ...... incorporates the
      AltMark Data Fields into packets in order to enable Alternate-
      Marking."
and
      "An unmarking node, ......
      and then removes any AltMark Option from packets."
Suggest to make it consistent between "AltMark Data Fields" and "AltMark
Option", because what you remove should be that you incorporated before.

Section 6.2, suggest to add a reference to draft-he-idr-bgp-flowspec-ifit which
defines BGP extensions to distribute BGP FlowSpec based traffic filtering
carrying IFIT information.

draft-fz-spring-srv6-alt-mark has been published as RFC 9947.

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