Paradigms for Distributed Systems Management

This chapter addresses the main paradigms for distributed systems management. Management models have been developed in the past few years, mainly in the course of standardization activities, such as OSI Systems Management, the Internet Engineering Task Force, or the Open Distributed Processing initiative, but also under significant research effort. As these models have matured, a number of significant paradigms have been retained, and made it possible to define the generic body of research and technology of today’s systems management. We will make a non-exhaustive effort to study the main paradigms, and in consequence, we will address: managers and managed objects, domains, management information bases, and the several management functions— configuration, faults, performance and QoS, accounting, security, names and directories.