An active CIM dependency pattern for a consistent service state monitoring

Before significant effects may be felt in service utilization by the user, detection of QoS degradation is a desirable requirement of service management. Management approaches define management information for each managed resource in a distributed environment, but a problem occurring on a resource denies access to its management information. A service has dependency relationships with all the components in the system, software or hardware. The paper focuses on the service level that is influenced by the subjacent levels, network and system, and elements, and investigates how to express these influences known by management experts in order to automate their processing. Our solution is to focus on the informational model independently from the other ones. The network and service management (NSM) domain is now on the way towards a unified and technology independent information model thanks to the CIM/DMTF specification of the WBEM initiative. This is to ensure both interoperability and the federation of management platforms from an informational point of view in the sense that the communication point of view is abstracted. This tendency opens new management modeling capabilities that the paper develops for consistent service monitoring.