Deborah L. Caswell

Using service models for management of Internet services

As Internet services grow in complexity, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are finding out that the ad hoc methods that they have employed thus far to monitor and diagnose their services are not sufficient to provide acceptable service quality to their subscribers. In this paper, we demonstrate how service models can he used by ISPs to effectively manage their service offerings. A service model encapsulates a human experts knowledge of a service, its components, and its interdependencies with other services. In addition, using ongoing measurements, a service model tracks the health of the different services and their components. By traversing a service model top-down, an operator can not only assess the overall health of a service, but also easily correlate the health of all the services and service components to determine the root cause of any problems that may occur. By minimizing the time and effort needed to diagnose problems, service models enable ISP operators to efficiently resolve problems that occur in an ISP environment. Since each ISP system is unique in many respects, unique service models have to be crafted for each of the services in every ISP system. Handcrafting customized service models requires enormous effort and time on the part of a human expert, a luxury that few ISPs can afford. In this paper, we describe a methodology for constructing customized service models for a target ISP system with minimal human intervention. This methodology relies on a service model creation engine that composes a custom service model for an ISP system using a predefined service model template specification and automatically discovered information about the target ISP system. We describe a prototype implementation of this methodology and present an example of a service model obtained from a real-world ISP system. The concepts described are applicable for the management of networks and services in enterprise systems as well.

Management of new federated services

The explosive growth of the Internet, widespread use of the World Wide Web, and a trend towards deployment of broadband residential networks are stimulating the development of new services such as interactive shopping, home banking, and electronic commerce. These services are federated since they depend on an infrastructure that spans multiple independent control domains. Managing federated services and providing effective support to the customer of these services is difficult, because only a small part of the environment can be observed and controlled by any given authority. We characterize different dimensions of this problem, using our experience with the deployment of a system that gives the home consumer broadband access to community content as well as to the Internet. This type of system is referred to as Broadband Interactive Data Services or BIDS. We then focus on diagnosis and describe a customer support tool that was developed to partially automate diagnosis in BIDS. We use the experience with this tool to derive a blueprint for a general architecture for managing federated services. The architecture is based on service contracts between control domains.

Auto-Discovery Capabilities for Service Management: An ISP Case Study

Auto-discovery is one of the key technologies that enables management systems to be quickly customized to the environments that they are intended to manage. As Internet services have grown in complexity in recent years, it is no longer sufficient to monitor and manage these services in isolation. Instead, it is critical that management systems discover dependencies that exist among Internet services, and use this knowledge for correlation of measurement resutls, so as to determine the root-causes of problems. While most existing management systems have focused on discovery of host, servers, and network elements in isolation, in this paper we describe auto-discovery techniques that discover relationships among services. Since new Internet services and service elements are being deployed at a rapid pace, it is essential that the discovery methodologies be implemented in an extensible manner, so that new discovery capabilities can be incrementally added to the management system. In this paper, we present an extensible architecture for auto-discovery and describe a prototype implementation of this architecture and associated auto-discovery techniques. We also highlight experiences from applying these techniques to discover real-world ISP systems. Although described in the context of ISP systems, the concepts described in this paper are applicable for the discovery of services and inter-service relationships in enterprise systems as well.