6 Conclusions and Areas of further Research

  In this paper, a CORBA-based approach for instrumenting management systems has been presented. The need for managing management systems arises because management systems of different authorities have to seamlessly interoperate with each other, even if they are based upon different management architectures. We have analyzed and evaluated three mechanisms for achieving interoperability. On the other hand, management systems are also very complex; it is thus essential to provide appropriate management information and services. Our aim was to define such an open, common set of management information that should be applicable to a wide range of management systems and management gateways. We have developed management models for these entities by analyzing which kinds of management information and services are needed to enable an integrated management of these systems.

Key to our approach is the perception of management as a distributed application that itself needs to be managed. We are then able to apply standardized frameworks for distributed applications (such as the RM-ODP) for the definition of generic MOCs that already contain a large set of management instrumentation at the top of the inheritance hierarchy. This management model was refined into more specific object classes that reflect the structure and functionality of management platforms available on the marketplace. We have implemented the object model described in this paper for instrumenting the commercial network management platform NetView for AIX by Java/CORBA-based management agents so that it can be managed from a web-based interface. We experienced that, apart from determining dependency relationships between instantiated components, almost the complete set of required management information can be provided by this management system. However, this information is scattered across different sources such as platform APIs, configuration files and configuration tools of the underlying operating system. A large part of our implementation work consisted in encapsulating all this information under a single type of interface.

With CORBAservices and CORBAfacilities, CORBA provides a very promising technology for integrated enterprise management since more and more services useful for management purposes are being standardized. The approach described in this paper has also been successfully applied to several cooperation projects with industrial partners for the management of networked services like NFS and NIS and for the re-engineering of agents for open CORBA-based management of ATM switches.

However, the mechanisms for transferring management services between management systems are yet unsatisfactory. We are now working on the following issues:

• The deployment of the OMG Mobile Agent System Interoperability Facility (MASIF) [19] to provide facilities for CORBA-based mobile management agents.
• The evaluation of the Java Dynamic Management Kit (JDMK) [8] to support the delegation of management functionality at runtime in Java/CORBA-based environments.