Power Systems Monitoring and Control using Telecom Network Management Standards

Historically, different solutions have been developed for power systems control and telecommunications network management environments. The former was characterized by proprietary solutions, while the latter has been involved for years in a strong standardization process guided by criteria of openness. Today, power systems control standardization is in progress, but it is at an early stage compared to the telecommunications management area, especially in terms of information modeling. Today, control equipment tends to exhibit more computational power, and communication lines have increased their performance. These trends hint at some conceptual convergence between power systems and telecommunications networks from a management perspective. This convergence leads us to suggest the application of well-established telecommunications management standards for power systems control. This paper shows that this is a real medium-to-long term possibility

Results of the CEO Project - WWW Management

This report contains the result of a ‘proof of concept’ study that was performed by the CTIT of the University of Twente, together with ESYS Limited (Guildford, UK) for the Institute of Remote Sensing Applications of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the EC (Ispra, Italy). The study is part of the ‘Centre of Earth Observation’ (CEO) programme. The subject of the study was the design and implementation of tools that allow status and utilisation monitoring of networks and distributed information servers. In the specific case of the CEO programme, these information servers are accessible via the WWW and contain large amounts of earth observation data (e.g. satellite pictures). The work division within the project was that ESYS investigated the management applications, which had to run on top of HP-Openview, and the CTIT designed and implemented the management agents. These agents had to include the following Management Information Bases (MIBs): • A HTTP-MIB, with detailed information concerning the WWW document transfer protocol. • A Retrieval Service (RS) MIB, with high level information concerning the WWW document transfer service. • An Information Store (IS) MIB, with information concerning the WWW server and the documents provided by that server. The specifications of these MIBs were presented to the IETF and provided a good starting point for subsequent standardization activities. The agents were implemented as sub-agents of the EMANATE extensible agent package and are currently being tested in a number of field trials

A Survey of Distributed Network and Systems Management Paradigms

Since the mid 1990s, network and systems management has steadily evolved from a centralized paradigm, where all the management processing takes place in a single management station, to distributed paradigms, where management is distributed over a potentially large number of nodes. Some of these paradigms, epitomized by the SNMPv2 and CMIP protocols, have been around for several years, whereas a flurry of new ones, based on mobile code, distributed objects or intelligent agents, only recently emerged. The goal of this survey is to classify all major network and systems management paradigms known to date, in order to help network and systems administrators design a management application. In the first part of the survey, we present a simple typology, based on a single criterion: the organizational model. In this typology, all paradigms are grouped into four types: centralized paradigms, weakly distributed hierarchical paradigms, strongly distributed hierarchical paradigms and cooperative paradigms. In the second part of the survey, we gradually build an enhanced typology, based on four criteria: delegation granularity, semantic richness of the information model, degree of specification of a task, and degree of automation of management. Finally, we show how to use our typologies to select a management paradigm in a given context. KEYWORDS Distributed Network Management, Distributed Systems Management, Integrated Management, Mobile Code, Distributed Objects, Intelligent Agents, Typology

A Generic Network and System Management Framework

Networks and distributed systems have formed the basis of an ongoing communications revolution that has led to the genesis of a wide variety of services. The constantly increasing size and complexity of these systems does not come without problems. In some organisations, the deployment of Information Technology has reached a state where the benefits from downsizing and rightsizing by adding new services are undermined by the effort required to keep the system running. Management of networks and distributed systems in general has a straightforward goal: to provide a productive environment in which work can be performed effectively. The work required for management should be a small fraction of the total effort. Most IT systems are still managed in an ad hoc style without any carefully elaborated plan. In such an environment the success of management decisions depends totally on the qualification and knowledge of the administrator. The thesis provides an analysis of the state of the art in the area of Network and System Management and identifies the key requirements that must be addressed for the provisioning of Integrated Management Services. These include the integration of the different management related aspects (i.e. integration of heterogeneous Network, System and Service Management). The thesis then proposes a new framework, INSMware, for the provision of Management Services. It provides a fundamental basis for the realisation of a new approach to Network and System Management. It is argued that Management Systems can be derived from a set of pre-fabricated and reusable Building Blocks that break up the required functionality into a number of separate entities rather than being developed from scratch. It proposes a high-level logical model in order to accommodate the range of requirements and environments applicable to Integrated Network and System Management that can be used as a reference model. A development methodology is introduced that reflects principles of the proposed approach, and provides guidelines to structure the analysis, design and implementation phases of a management system. The INSMware approach can further be combined with the componentware paradigm for the implementation of the management system. Based on these principles, a prototype for the management of SNMP systems has been implemented using industry standard middleware technologies. It is argued that development of a management system based on Componentware principles can offer a number of benefits. INSMware Components may be re-used and system solutions will become more modular and thereby easier to construct and maintain

Distributed management based on mobile agents

During the forthcoming years, Internet-based concepts will continue to revolutionize, in an unpredictable way, the mode enterprises provide, maintain and use traditional information technology. Management systems will be a crucial issue in the struggle with this crescent complexity. However, new requirements have to be considered, due to the expectation of enormous quantities of different elements, ranging from an impressive network bandwidth availability to multimedia QoS-constrained services. Many researchers believe that mobile agent paradigm can provide effective solutions on these new scenarios. This paper presents an implementation of management applications supported upon distribution and delegation concepts. For that it uses the current work of IETF’s Disman working group enhanced with mobility provision. The mobility allows the distributed managers to adapt dynamically to a mutable environment optimizing the use of network resources

NETWORK MONITORING : Using Nagios as an Example Tool

The aim of this thesis is to implement a network monitoring using an open source network management utility to check the state of network elements and associated services. Such management tools must have capability to detect and respond to faults in the network by generating appropriate alert to notify the system administrator accordingly. Nagios core was used as the network management utility for the network for demonstration of monitoring exercise. Theoretical functions of the Nagios Core were presented and a concise description of SNMP was addressed in relation to the Nagios functionalities. Nagios was configured with its plug-ins and used against a test-laboratory network run in the Linux environment. The test network comprised of two switches, one router and the Nagios server. The results from the Laboratory demonstration exercises are presented in the framework. Furthermore, the implementations of Nagios for optimal performance can be laborious, but my experiences with Nagios and its resourceful outcomes proved to be worthwhile. Nagios is therefore recommended for use in companies and institutions for monitoring their networks. Also, the laboratory part of this thesis could be used as a learning module for students to acquire skills and to identify the importance of network monitoring

Hardware Interfacing in the Broadcast Industry Using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)

Communication between various broadcast equipment plays a major role in the daily operation of a typical broadcast facility. For example, editing equipment must interface with tape machines, production switchers must interface with font generators and video effect equipment, and satellite ground controllers must interface with satellite dishes and receivers. Communication between these devices may be a simple hardware handshake configuration or a more elaborate software based communications via serial or parallel interfacing. This thesis concerns itself with the software interfacing needed to allow various dissimilar types of equipment to communicate, and therefore, interface with each other. The use of Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) in a non-typical manner for the purpose of hardware interfacing is the basis for this work