FCAPS in the Business Services Fabric Model

The emergence of the next generation of computational environment, consisting of interoperable public clouds, private clouds and private infrastructures, will provide on-demand ubiquitous virtual resources. The delivery of business services over these ubiquitous virtual resources requires a reexamination of how these services are managed and delivered to assure appropriate levels of service availability, performance, security and cost. In addition, these business services maybe realized using public and private services that are able to utilize all or restricted types of virtual resources. The focus of this paper is the application to services of the well understood concepts of Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance and Security (FCAPS) management introduced in the Telecommunications Management Network (TMN). The paper proposes the incorporation of FCAPS management capabilities at a minimum into all services at a component level to enable end-to-end service management.The FCAPS capabilities are realized through management policy, and managed through collaboration between agents implementing the FCAPS capability; a commonly used subset list of FCAPS capabilities - these can be individually or as a sub-group realized by service agents for incorporation in both managed and management service agents. The model does not mandate a centralized or distributed FCAPS management capability. The model does indicate that the management capabilities are required at every layer of the services environment.