During the recent years, integrated management has become more complicated due to the standardization of several competing management architectures: This adds additional heterogeneity to the already existing amount of heterogeneity of today's distributed systems. The most widespread management architectures are the OSI/TMN and Internet (SNMP-based) management frameworks. With the lack of interoperability between these different management architectures, there is a strong demand for solutions that provide smooth transition paths between them.
This presentation describes the results of a research project dealing with the design and implementation of a Q Adapter Function (QAF), often called Management Gateway for the integration of SNMP-managed resources in a TMN environment [16] . QAFs are a mechanism for bringing management information from the pre-TMN installed base of systems into a TMN environment [3]. The reason for choosing a TMN-compliant management platform as the core of our distributed management system is the fact that the OSI/TMN management architecture yields the largest set of management functionality by far. On the other hand, since SNMP agents are in widespread use, an integrated management solution needs to take into account the Internet management framework. Furthermore, if the Internet managed objects appear from the managing system's perspective similar to the other OSI/TMN managed objects, the complete set of OSI/TMN management functionality can be applied to them.
This paper is organized as follows: Section 1 compares three possible ways for bridging the gaps between different management architectures and gives the reasons why we decided to use the QAF approach. Section 2 describes the underlying concepts and the principal steps for designing a QAF for SNMP; it also presents already existing algorithms and methods which have been used for the design of our prototype. Obviously, the development tools have an impact on the structure of the acquired solution; section 3 therefore describes the IBM TMN Products, a TMN development toolset that we used for the QAF implementation, and explains the architecture of the prototype. Section 4 discusses several implementation issues and features of the QAF, namely how the scoping and filtering capabilities are realized and how the capabilities of the QAF can be increased by introducing SNMP MIBs describing new resources. Finally, section 5 concludes the paper and presents issues for further research.