| During the 1980's and 1990's much work was done relating to the standardized management of heterogeneous network hardware. The extension of these efforts to consider the management of arbitrary software networks has not been undertaken.; Today, even in "small scale" enterprise environments, or intranets, one cannot find, in the general case, what distributed application software is installed, running or has run. One cannot determine, which distributed applications are cooperating, or which processes are communicating. This deficiency becomes tremendously problematic in cases where large sets of heterogeneous distributed applications execute to service mission critical business functions. In this domain, the processes of fault, performance and configuration management are at best highly inconsistent and expensive. Most often these processes are completely chaotic or non-existent.; This work addresses the problem of methodically creating manageable multi-vendor distributed software applications, which will support methodical consistent fault, performance and configuration management.; Specifically, we applied object-oriented methodologies in order to describe at a very generalized level the management environment for centrally administered distributed software applications. From these object and state models were built specializations which contained information and behaviors of two specific centrally configured distributed software applications. We showed via proof of concept that both distributed software application instrumentation implementations as well the corresponding standard internet management implementations can be methodically derived from the original object models.; Our work offers and documents a Generalized Object and State Model for Distributed Applications, a software instrumentation methodology and a precise managed object to managed resource definition for application software. We further offer and document an internet standards based agent prototype tailored for instrumented application software and an internet standards based management application prototype designed to manage the distributed applications environment. |
