Metin Feridun

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.

ADK-building mobile agents for network and systems management from reusable components

Mobile agents, programs that move within a system performing a set of tasks, are an active field of research. The focus of current research, however, is on the development of execution platforms and applications for mobile agents and not on methodologies for building agents. Creating mobile agents can be tedious and susceptible to errors. We propose a framework where the agent is composed using a well-defined set of categories of software components. Building systems from software components has already proven useful in the context of large software systems, increasing the productivity of the development process and the reliability of the measuring system by reusing proven components. We claim that the same holds true for the construction of mobile agents for network and systems management as well as for other domains. We have designed and implemented an agent construction toolkit (the AgentBean Development Kit-ADK) to demonstrate the usability and flexibility of this approach.

Management Technologies for E-Commerce and E-Business Applications

Keynote Speakers.- More Research Is Indeed Needed in E-commerce Where Were Business Academicians When We Needed Them?.- Cool to Critical: Managing Web Services Now.- Panel Session.- Enforcing QoS: Myth or Reality?.- Managing Quality of Service.- Modeling of Service-Level Agreements for Composed Services.- The Architecture of NG-MON: A Passive Network Monitoring System for High-Speed IP Networks1.- Automated SLA Monitoring for Web Services.- Optimizing Quality of Service Using Fuzzy Control.- Measuring Qualit of Service.- Interaction Translation Methods for XML/SNMP Gateway.- Measuring Application Response Times with the CIM Metrics Model.- Quality Aspects in IT Service Management.- Service Architectures.- Replication and Notification Management in a Knowledge Delivery Network.- Delivering Service Adaptation with 3G Technology.- Remote Code Browsing, a Network Based Computation Utility.- Policy and Process.- Performance Study of COPS over TLS and IPsec Secure Session.- A Criteria Catalog Based Methodology for Analyzing Service Management Processes.- A Comparative Study of Policy Specification Languages for Secure Distributed Applications.- Fault Analysis.- Two Dimensional Time-Series for Anomaly Detection and Regulation in Adaptive Systems.- A Hot-Failover State Machine for Gateway Services and Its Application to a Linux Firewall.- Distributed Fault Localization in Hierarchically Routed Networks.

Network management using Internet technologies

As networks grow in size, speed and flexibility, the role of network management becomes increasingly important. Recent developments in Internet technologies might provide the capabilities that are well suited to the solutions of some very challenging, outstanding problems in network management. The increasing popularity of the World Wide Web, with its established user interface and the ability to run on almost any platform, offers a new way to provide wide access to complex software applications. The goal of this paper is to describe some key capabilities of Internet technologies and critically assess whether there is a match between these technologies and the needs in managing networks.

A framework for distributed management with mobile components

Abstract 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 that 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 configured and downloaded dynamically 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.

Using linked data for systems management

Integration of data from multiple sources makes it possible to build effective systems management solutions. Despite the expected benefits, data integration remains a challenge. Heterogeneity between data sources in terms of lack of an accepted common model, data semantics and access methods are among the difficulties. The goal of our research is to realize loosely coupled integration of data for systems management by building a lightweight mechanism to easily browse, search and query data across multiple sources without enforcing a common model across all sources. The approach is based on the emerging Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies proposed for the World Wide Web (WWW). The focus of this short paper is to report on our work on the transformation of management data sources into Linked Data providers.

Editorial: management of IT services

The significant increase in the complexity of enterprise applications and the customer demand for distributed information technology (IT) services has led to a change in the way systems are managed. The focus has moved from deviceoriented to customerand service-oriented management. Device-oriented management remains important as it is an essential requirement for efficient IT service management. However deviceoriented management is exclusively in the domain of the provider and is driven by the objectives of the provider. On the other hand, what has become essential today is the management of the underlying infrastructure with respect to the services offered to customers and the agreed upon service level agreements. There has been a paradigm shift to IT service management; with this shift we need to deal with new and challenging management issues. Among the challenges of service-oriented management is the accounting, charging and billing of the offered services. The first paper entitled The Cumulus Pricing Model as an Adaptive Framework for Feasible, Efficient, and User-friendly Tariffing of Internet Services by Peter Reichel, David Hausheer and Burkhard Stiller addresses the aspect of charging for quality of service (QoS)-enabled Internet services. The authors propose the use of the Cumulus Pricing Scheme (CPS) as a framework for pricing Internet services by showing that the CPS allows a well-balanced compromise between economic viability and technical feasibility. Another challenge of IT service management is service provisioning. Service providers compete for customers by offering high quality services, the

Simplifying Correlation Rule Creation for Effective Systems Monitoring

Event correlation is a necessary component of systems management but is perceived as a difficult function to set up and maintain. We report on our work to develop a set of tools and techniques to simplify event correlation and thereby reduce overall operating costs. The tools prototyped are described and our current plans for future tool development outlined.

A search engine for systems management

This paper describes a search facility for systems management that was designed and implemented to simplify the management of large IT infrastructures. As the complexity of data centers or telecommunication networks increases, managing such infrastructures involves large amounts of data originating from many and diverse sources. In a typical IT management infrastructure, we find many management components such as commercial and open source products (e.g., for monitoring); custom, be-spoke software (e.g., a home-grown inventory database) as well as additional conventional (e.g., calendar) and unconventional (e.g., Web forums, blogs) data sources. The amount of information and the number of tools that are at the disposal of the system operator for management tasks are both wide-ranging and overwhelming. Finding the set of information and tools that is relevant to solve a given problem is a challenge, and typically requires expertise in how to extract data from the available data sources and how to use that extracted data effectively. A search facility that can locate data and tools is beneficial to systems management, but to maximize its impact, it needs to address the heterogeneity of data and data sources; provide task-focused, structured and enriched results, and be both scalable and cost-effective in the dynamic and changing environment of todays IT infrastructures. This paper describes such a system, called Fusio, that provides a search capability based on a loose coupling of heterogeneous, systems-management-related data in an IT environment. Fusio is based on the Semantic Web and traditional information-retrieval technologies. Tools such as Fusio are useful for system operators in carrying out tasks, such as problem resolution, where pointers to related information and tools can be quickly found to speed up the task. They are also useful for training purposes, e.g., as a reference to available data and tools. The paper describes the architecture of the search facility and the prototype implementation that is now being deployed in a test environment.

A scalable lightweight performance monitoring tool for storage clusters

Distributed infrastructures providing cloud services as well as compute- and storage clusters are notoriously difficult to administer and optimize. Management applications benefit from up-to-date data on system performance. This paper describes the Performance Monitoring and Management System (PMMS), a light-weight and versatile performance monitoring tool that collects hundreds of thousands of metrics per second and delivers this information as time-series in near real-time. At its core lies an in-memory database that scales through federation to large clusters of several hundreds of nodes. Data is collected using sensors which collect and periodically send their metric data to the PMMS collectors. Designed as a component that is embeddable into a larger system, PMMS is light-weight, with little impact on the system resources and it is easy to install and to configure.