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 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