An architecture for managing distributed systems

The authors describe an architecture for managing distributed systems which has been jointly specified by two Esprit projects, SYSMAN (7026) and IDSM (6311). The emphasis, in this architecture, is on the use of domains to group managed objects and partition the management structure to cope with very large scale inter-organizational distributed systems. Another key aspect of the architecture is a policy service to support the specification, storage and manipulation of policies which can be used to influence the behavior of automated managers. The architecture advocates the use of object-based distributed processing techniques for management and essentially extends the OSF DME approach to cater to domains and policies as underlying management services for all aspects of management