Each vendor of routers, switches, and other network equipment has its specific interface to monitor and configure these boxes. Although tools exist to display the network configuration and to interact with the network, these tools have a limited functionality.
Our goal is to design a network management tool that decouples the design of network applications from the specific equipment interface.
A
significant gap exists between the network control plane and the service
management plane. The term network control plane refers to the parts in
protocols that control network behavior, such as routing, forwarding, and
scheduling. The term service management plane includes the creation,
monitoring, accounting, and control of network services. SNT is a network
management software toolkit designed to bridge that gap through a closed-loop
control mechanism.
SNT
is an integrated, programmable toolkit for network management systems (NMS)
development. The direct users of SNT are NMS application programs which
implements certain control policy or business logic. These programs measure and
configure the underlying physical networks through SNT. SNT provides a logical
model of the physical networks. SNT also provides a layer of service
abstractions based on the logical model. The measurement and configuration
functions are built into the service abstractions—a design which allows the
application programs to implement closed-loop control mechanism.
This slide provides a high-level view of the objectives of SNT. The following web site explains the key ideas.