Management issues for distributed services

Abstract

The paper advocates a distributed processing approach to managing distributed services whereby managed objects have a management interface to support their management functionality and other interfaces to support their normal functionality. We discuss the shortcomings of the SNMP and OSI approaches to management for large scale distributed services and explain the need for three basic management services-monitoring to obtain information; domains to group objects and partition responsibility; and policy to permit the behaviour of automated managers to be modified without reimplementation. The key message of the paper is that management should not be designed and implemented independently from the normal functionality provided by a service but that standard distributed processing concepts, tools and techniques should be used for management. This approach permits the management system to be used to manage itself.<>