Towards XML oriented internet management

Internet management is based on IETF specifications that have been developed and used during the past 14 years: There are multiple versions and options of the management protocol (SNMP), two versions of the language for specifying the structure of management information (SMI), and more than 160 Standard MIB modules. This altogether represents the most widely deployed management technology these days. However, the SNMP centered management framework has some drawbacks especially related to efficient configuration management and efficient application development processes. Today to many people the whole family of XML technologies seems to promise a fancy way out of this trouble. This paper presents an approach to automatically convert SMI MIB definitions and according SNMP agent data into XML Schema definitions and appropriate valid XML documents. Instead of a plain mapping of MIB trees to nested XML elements, we tried to adapt the XML philosophy of a rather flat element containment hierarchy and appropriate XML Schema type definitions. We also present an approach towards an SNMP/XML gateway and our thoughts on management applications based on XML technologies.