A web services based framework for efficient monitoring and event reporting.

Network and Service Management (NSM) is a research discipline with significant research contributions the last 25 years. Despite the numerous standardised solutions that have been proposed for NSM, the quest for an "all encompassing technology" still continues. A new technology introduced lately to address NSM problems is Web Services (WS). Despite the research effort put into WS and their potential for addressing NSM objectives, there are efficiency, interoperability, etc issues that need to be solved before using WS for NSM. This thesis looks at two techniques to increase the efficiency of WS management applications so that the latter can be used for efficient monitoring and event reporting. The first is a query tool we built that can be used for efficient retrieval of management state data close to the devices where they are hosted. The second technique is policies used to delegate a number of tasks from a manager to an agent to make WS-based event reporting systems more efficient. We tested the performance of these mechanisms by incorporating them in a custom monitoring and event reporting framework and supporting systems we have built, against other similar mechanisms (XPath) that have been proposed for the same tasks, as well as previous technologies such as SNMP. Through these tests we have shown that these mechanisms are capable of allowing us to use WS efficiently in various monitoring and event reporting scenarios. Having shown the potential of our techniques we also present the design and implementation challenges for building a GUI tool to support and enhance the above systems with extra capabilities. In summary, we expect that other problems WS face will be solved in the near future, making WS a capable platform for it to be used for NSM

Managing mobile agents with SNMP

This paper describe a project that integrates SNMP into a mobile agent environment in order to achieve a simple but powerful goal: mobile agents have to manage and being managed through SNMP

The development of a discovery and control environment for networked audio devices based on a study of current audio control protocols

This dissertation develops a standard device model for networked audio devices and introduces a novel discovery and control environment that uses the developed device model. The proposed standard device model is derived from a study of current audio control protocols. Both the functional capabilities and design principles of audio control protocols are investigated with an emphasis on Open Sound Control, SNMP and IEC-62379, AES64, CopperLan and UPnP. An abstract model of networked audio devices is developed, and the model is implemented in each of the previously mentioned control protocols. This model is also used within a novel discovery and control environment designed around a distributed associative memory termed an object space. This environment challenges the accepted notions of the functionality provided by a control protocol. The study concludes by comparing the salient features of the different control protocols encountered in this study. Different approaches to control protocol design are considered, and several design heuristics for control protocols are proposed

Comparing the Performance of SNMP and Web Services-Based Management

his paper compares the performance of Web services based network monitoring to traditional, SNMP based, monitoring. The study focuses on the ifTable, and investigates performance as function of the number of retrieved objects. The following aspects are examined: bandwidth usage, CPU time, memory consumption and round trip delay. For our study several prototypes of Web services based agents were implemented; these prototypes can retrieve single ifTable elements, ifTable rows, ifTable columns or the entire ifTable. This paper presents a generic formula to calculate SNMP’s bandwidth requirements; the bandwidth consumption of our prototypes was compared to that formula. The CPU time, memory consumption and round trip delay of our prototypes was compared to Net-SNMP, as well as several other SNMP agents. Our measurements show that SNMP is more efficient in cases where only a single object is retrieved; for larger number of objects Web services may be more efficient. Our study also shows that, if performance is the issue, the choice between BER (SNMP) or XML (Web services) encoding is generally not the determining factor; other choices can have stronger impact on performance

The SNMP evolution: lost on simplicity or on functionality

The SNMP framework has gained a new stimulus with the efficient emergence of the third version (SNMPv3). Beyond its enrichments, namely the security model, the enormous base of legacy knowledge and legacy systems leads the SNMP management framework to a necessary choice in nowadays management scenarios. However, its services correspond roughly to low-level operations for setting or retrieving network equipment parameters. Traditionally, high-level management operations were outside the scope of IETF strategy. The IETF Distributed Management working group have been producing normalization documents that intent to apply to the enrichment of SNMP semantics, especially in what concerns the processing of management information. One of such deliverables is the Expression MIB that, up till now, is in the Internet draft standard track. This paper will highlight the recent outcome of this WG, will present an Expression MIB implementation and will discuss the cost of these more powerful solutions on the “keep simple” and “low inference” principles of SNMP engines

Distributed management: implementation issues

Management processes have to react on time to the new challenges put by a crescent movement of the computing world to the Internet paradigm. The enormous base of legacy knowledge and legacy systems leads the SNMP management framework to a necessary choice in nowadays management scenarios. However, even with the recent SNMPv3, its services correspond roughly to low-level operations for setting or retrieving network equipment parameters. The IETF Distributed Management working group have been producing normalization documents that intent to apply to the enrichment of SNMP semantics, especially in what concerns the processing of management information. This paper will present the recent outcome of this WG and will discuss an implementation project that aims to apply mobile agent technology in these scenarios