Integrating SNMP agents with XML-based management systems

XML-based network management systems are becoming more and more popular these days. However, it has to be taken into account that there is a broad existing management infrastructure based on non-XML protocols. Today, the most dominant technology in Internet management is based on the SNMP framework. This article presents an approach for seamless integration of management information supplied by SNMP agents into XML-based systems. This is done by an automated transformation of SMI MIB definitions into XML schema definitions, which implies a corresponding transformation of SNMP management information into XML documents. Furthermore, we present an SNMP-to-XML gateway that allows retrieval of such XML management information at runtime.