DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION PRINCIPLES FOR
INTEGRATED NETWORK AND SYSTEM MANAGEMENT
Martin H. Knahl
Network Research Group, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, PL4 8AA, United Kingdom
Keywords: Computer Networks, Network and System Management, Planning and Operation, Applications.
Abstract: Rising costs for the maintenance of increasingly heterogeneous IT infrastructures has been one of the main
reasons why anticipated cost reductions with the evolving structures have not materialised. This paper
provides an analysis of the requirements for Management Services. The paper presents an approach for the
design and realisation of Integrated Management Services. Management Systems are divided into different
functional areas and can be derived from a set of Building Blocks in order to accommodate the range of
requirements and environments applicable to Integrated Service Management. The paper further presents
ways to utilize SW implementations for the provision of integrated Management Services based on the
proposed principles. The construction and maintenance of Management Systems is facilitated by the use of
existing solutions.
1 INTRODUCTION
Rising costs in running and maintaining the IT
(including the communication infrastructures) has
been one of the main reasons why cost reductions
anticipated with the evolving structures have not
been realised. Another development has been an
increased heterogeneity of IT environments. The
problems encountered in the context of management
provision are promoting a concentration of
technologies and manufacturers. The addition of cost
considerations and the technical aspects illustrate the
problem space for the provision of Integrated
Management Services.
The problem analysis identifies current
approaches and requirements that must be addressed
for the provisioning of Integrated Management
Services. The paper then presents a planning and
operation approach based on the INSMware
framework. Management Systems are divided into
different functional areas and can be derived from a
set of Building Blocks in order to accommodate the
range of requirements and environments applicable
to INSM. The process to derive an implementation
for the provision of integrated Management Services
based on the proposed principles is illustrated and
evaluated. The construction and maintenance of
Management Systems is facilitated by the use of
INSMware Software Components that can be reused
and adapted for different management scenarios
(Knahl, 2004).
2 PROBLEM ANALYSIS
The analysis of requirements for Integrated
Management Services produced two categories,
namely Architectural (e.g. System Distribution) and
Operational (e.g. System Evolution) requirements
(see Table 1). The Management Architecture has to
enable the distribution of Management Services to
reflect the requirements of a given infrastructure
(Lewis, 2003). The extensive overhead resulting
from this requirement results from the challenges
associated with the distributed system technologies
of the existing and future heterogeneous
infrastructures and the wide variety of the mobile
systems and services. Therefore the architecture
must neither impose additional constraints on the
underlying distributed systems technology nor rely
on specific system environment (e.g. with respect to
the location of certain services and resources).
Operational requirements refer to an actual
implementation and operation of the Management
Architecture. These requirements facilitate the
process of formulating, developing and refining the
418
H. Knahl M. (2007).
DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION PRINCIPLES FOR INTEGRATED NETWORK AND SYSTEM MANAGEMENT.
In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Internet Technology, pages 418-421
DOI: 10.5220/0001280804180421
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

Archtitectural Operational
1. System Distribution 1. System Evolution
2. System Extensibility 2. System use and development
3. Compact Architecture 3. Support of distributed environ-
4. Modular Architecture ment
5. Based on open standards 4. Efficient resource utilisation
6. Based on generic development 5. System portability and generality
methodology 6. Support of Internet standards
7. Support of existing development 7. Support of management
languages and technologies standards
8. Integration with 3rd Party 8. System scalability and
Building Blocks performance
9. Reuse of existing Building Blocks 9. Support of specific platform
10. Security support features
10. System administration
principles for a flexible, composite and
comprehensive integrated Management System
capable of meeting both the immediate requirements
and accommodating those which will arise as
technologies develop.
Table 1: Requirements for new Management Systems.
The delegation of routine management tasks to a
management system enables a human administrator
to concentrate on high level activities such as
business process monitoring or strategic network
planning and control. The Management Platform
approach tends to be based on loosely integrated
applications that are used alongside each other on a
common user interface (Dornan, 2001; Mayerl,
2003). Furthermore, Management Platforms such as
IBM Tivoli or HPOpenView typically require
complex customization to reflect specific
characteristics and integration of 3
rd
party
applications through proprietary interfaces (Mayerl,
2003). System Management is mainly being
resolved on an application specific basis. General
methodologies and approaches for the management
of distributed applications (e.g. license and
performance monitoring) and services are still at the
development stage (Cox, 2005; Foster, 2004; Naik,
2004). Service Management will gain in importance
compared to the management of resources and
network elements as the need to provide customised
services for users with specific requirements (e.g.
specified in a Service Level Agreement) will further
increase. To cope with these challenges,
Management Systems can be composed of a range
of components that perform the required
Management Services (Knahl, 2004; Lewis, 2003).
Uniform concepts for solutions are not yet available
and existing approaches only touch upon certain
aspects (Cox, 2005; Lewis, 2003).
The IETF management related standards focus
largely on TCP/IP related management provision,
the TMN family of standards focusing largely on
telecommunications network and network element
problems (Patel, 2002). The TMForum has provided
guidance on how Management Systems could be
planned and developed within their architectural
frameworks (TMF-OM, 2000). A novel management
system should reflect this and combine it with an
appropriate planning and operation strategy to
integrate management into the business processes
(Knahl, 2004). Management instrumentation of
existing resources is complicated and expensive.
Therefore management requirements of resources
and services must be incorporated in the
development process taking the management aspects
into account at the stage of resource and service
development. This has to apply particularly for
application development. Developers have to
become more sensitive toward these management
related problems. The development of Management
Services must focus on user requirements and the
development technologies should facilitate rather
than dominate the planning and implementation
stages.
3 PLANNING AND OPERATION
APPROACH
The planning, running, maintenance and
configuration of an IT infrastructure and services are
embedded in the Business Processes of an
organisation. The better the management tools
integrate with Business Processes the more useful
they are from the viewpoint of the IT service
provider and hence, the higher the acceptance.
Hence the overall aim is the integration of the
Management Services with the Business Processes
through the Management Framework as illustrated
in Figure 1. The co-ordination of these activities
requires support for defining and implementing task
dependencies, business rules and data across the
various domains of a given organisation. The
Management Services provide the fundamental
mechanisms for the management of the integrated IT
services. The Management Services provide the
required management functions and support
protocols such as SNMP or CMIP to access the
elements of the IT infrastructure. The User Services
support the interaction with Management Actors.
These services provide a role oriented view on the
operational process and support the Management
Actor to perform the required Management Tasks.
The Cooperation Services provide the cooperation
between the different systems involved in the
DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION PRINCIPLES FOR INTEGRATED NETWORK AND SYSTEM MANAGEMENT
419

running of the business processes. The Management
Framework interfaces must enable the integration,
definition and customisation of Management
Services utilising the Process Guidelines Repository,
Service Level Agreements and Management
Statistics that provides existing guidelines. An
implementation of the proposed Management
Framework has to support the lifecycles of a
network (i.e. initial planning and design,
implementation, operation, extension and
modification of infrastructure and services).
User
Services
Generic Business Processes
Process
Guidelines
Process
Guidelines
Networks, Systems, Applications
Monitoring &
Maintenance
Service
Configuration
Planning &
Design
Management Framework
Management
Services
Management
Statistics
Management
Statistics
SLAsSLAs
Enterprise
Business Appl.
Workflow
Mgmt. System
Cooperation
Services
Figure 1: Process Integration.
The ISNMware planning and operation
methodology consists of an initial model of a system
based on the INSMware reference model followed
by the addition of further implementation and
process details during the design of a system. The
methodology proposes an iterative development
process and is based on INSMware Building Blocks
(Knahl, 2004). Representing Building Block at an
analysis level as well as at a design level enables
Building Block reuse to become central to the
analysis process and to relevant to the business
process reengineering activity (Knahl, 2004).
4 SYSTEMS REALISATION
For the practical realisation of the INSMware model
Software Components were used to implement
Building Blocks (Knahl, 2004). A number of
INSMware Building Blocks, such as those to
provide error notifications are useful across different
INSM environments (i.e. Horizontal Domain
Common Building Blocks). Other INSMware
Building Blocks (e.g. proprietary Configuration
Management) are useful within a single or limited
number of management environments (i.e. Vertical
Domain Common Building Blocks).
Software reuse forms a basis to meet the
challenges of developing software within cost and
time constraints. One enabling technique is the reuse
of commercial off the shelf Software Components
developed by a third party. The INSMware
Developer can further practise software reuse by
reusing solutions to frequently occurring problems
or by implementing standard management solutions
popular with Management Service Providers. For the
development and usage of Software Components
different stakeholders have different roles and
requirements (Knahl, 2004; Lewis, 2003). The
Standard Provider develops standards to establish
new technologies and as a response to requests from
the other roles. The Service User requires
standardised service management interfaces that
enable it to move between INSM Service Providers
easily and thus enabling competition. INSMware
Developers and the Management Component
Providers will further have an interest in using
standards that promote software portability and
integration (e.g. CORBA).
A prototypical implementation of the approach
has been developed using a number of INSMware
Software Components running on top of industry
standard distribution architectures such as CORBA
(Knahl, 2004). The design of the individual
INSMware components is based on a domain
specification that subdivides the entire application
domain into sub domains and integrates SNMP
Managed Objects.
Installation &
Distribution
Access & Operation
Services
P
e
r
s
i
s
t
e
n
c
e
INSMware Management
Component
S
e
c
u
r
i
t
y
I
n
t
e
r
a
c
t
i
o
n
M
a
n
a
g
e
m
e
n
t
I
n
t
e
r
f
a
c
e
Figure 2: Distributed Management Entity.
Nodes that deploy Management Components
must be instrumented with the appropriate execution
environment. Management Systems consist of one or
a set of management components that carry out
management tasks of different levels of complexity
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within the overall INSMware model. The services
required for the distribution and communication (i.e.
Installation and Distribution Services) are either
provided by the middleware infrastructure or must
be incorporated into the INSMware implementation
(see Figure 2).
Based on this INSMware implementation several
distribution scenarios have been realised and tested.
In a basic configuration, all components are installed
on one system. In this scenario, remote users
connect to this system to receive all information. In
the fully distributed configuration, all components
are installed on different computers. However, in
practical terms it is better to implement the
Database, Communication and Event Manager
component on one system. Using this distribution
good performance is achieved as this distribution
situation avoids heavy traffic through the network
connecting the different computers (Knahl, 2004).
Furthermore the performance requirements of the
Management Interface could affect the performance
of the overall system.
Front-End
User a
SNMP
Management
Interface#1
SNMP
Management
Interface#2
Back-
End 1
Back-
End 2
Back-
End 3
Front-
End
12 34 5
PC Donau
Ethernet Switch
BACKBONE NODE
12LL345
BACKBONE NODE
12LL345
Router
PC Elbe
Back-End
Components
Figure 3: INSMware Monitoring of System States.
Figure 3 illustrates the implementation of a
distributed INSMware environment to monitor the
availability of an End-to-End connection. Two
Management interfaces are being used to gather data
from SNMP Managed Objects (for example the
SNMP MIB II parameter ‘SystemUpTime’ can be
used to gather general information about the time a
system has been running). The data is received and
analysed by the local Management Interfaces and
then processed by the Back-End Components.
Management Services can be modified with new
component versions and additional Software
Components can be linked to the core system and
can migrate to other systems thus allowing the
system to address new management requirements
and network topologies.
5 CONCLUSIONS
The presented research provides a fundamental basis
for the realisation of a new approach to Network and
System Management. It has been illustrated that
INSM development can benefit from a structured
modelling approach and that Componentware based
architectures for the provision of Management
Services 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.
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