This section will sketch a subset of the overall management functionality that is needed for MSs in order to interwork properly.
Configuration management services provide the ease of introducing new MSs into distributed environments by dynamically assigning them configuration profiles covering domain affiliation and polling intervals. A MS therefore needs to provide functionality for downloading initial configuration profiles to other MSs. If delegation is supported, the usual operations that apply to delegated management functionality (start, stop, suspend, resume etc.) should be present.
Of major importance for fault management are basic operations like verifying whether all the components of an MS are running and services for (re-)starting or stopping either the complete MS or single components should be available. Checking the consistency of the MS database and the execution of maintenance (e.g., backup and restore) and error detection tasks need also to be done at regular intervals that may require scheduling mechanisms. In case of errors, the event and error logs maintained by an MS provide a rich source of information for determining the probable cause of failures; consequently, facilities for searching these logs according to different criteria should be available.
The configuration of event forwarding mechanisms, the initiation of management operations on peer MSs and the registration of an MS for specific events require security services to ensure that no security policy is violated.
Services related to performance and accounting management include the generation of reports about resources administered by a specific MS (statistics, system parameters filtered according to different criteria like throughput, delay, load and usage) and should therefore be made available to network administrators.