Experience in the design and implementation of an object-oriented network management system

The design and implementation of network management systems is one of the first application areas in which the use of object-orientation was applied on a wide scale. A major reason is that resources that need to be managed in computer networks seem to map naturally into objects. However, network management systems which can deal with heterogeneous networks are very complex systems, and it is easy to end up with a large number of poorly designed objects instead of an integrated and effective system. This paper evaluates the weaknesses of some of the common object-oriented analysis techniques, and provide the outline of a methodology which will avoid some of these pitfalls in the design and implementation of an X.25 network management system based on an object-oriented database management system (OODBMS).