A Model driven software platform for Network Management Applications

NMS/EMS applications are designed to perform management tasks such as fault, configuration, performance, accounting and security on the various network elements. Typically network information such as physical, logical inventory, alarms and the like are persisted on the management station´s database. The management station also routinely accesses the devices for faults and configurations. Due to the diverse nature of the network, applications need to understand the different management protocols and associated device intricacies to interact with the device. Similarly applications are exposed to the underlying data model and database access mechanisms. This makes the applications hard to evolve and cumbersome to maintain as any changes in the underlying mechanisms warrants a change in the application. Thus there is a need for a uniform model and a component based on it for device as well as database access, which abstracts the underlying details so that applications can focus on providing valuable services. The objective of this paper is to highlight the need for a uniform model and propose a metadata driven approach for device and database access components