Comparing Web services with SNMP in a management by delegation environment

The traditional management by delegation model has lead the IETF, more recently, to define its Script MIB, which allows management entities to transfer, control and retrieve results generated by management scripts. These operations, however, can also be accomplished by Web services. Web services have been pointed out as an interesting approach for network management in general, but in this paper we present the use of Web services in the specific context of management by delegation. We also present a Web services-based system prototype that allows us to compare a Script MIB implementation against SNMP to Web service gateways for management by delegation.