Distributed Management with Mobile Components

The increasing importance of networks and the growing numbers of devices and services that run on them necessitate effective network and systems management. The traditional centralized management paradigm alone is no longer sufficient for effective management solutions, primarily as it does not scale well. Distribution of management tasks is a promising approach. The distributed management framework (DMF) presented in this paper provides an environment which allows a broad range of management tasks to move and run anywhere within the managed system. In our approach, management tasks are lightweight applications that can be dynamically configured and downloaded as required, reducing the load on managed resources and simplifying the problem of management software updates. We present an object-oriented, Java-based implementation of the DMF and describe applications developed on this platform.