Towards a requirements-based information model for configuration management

Several architectures are defined for distributed systems management, most of which stem from the network management domain. They all share the idea of multiple models, at least comprising an information model, a communication model, and a functional model. Configuration management is part of the functional model but is very dependent on the information model. Due to its history in network management, the information model itself is mostly restricted to describe a priori known properties of hardware entities or software entities closely bound to the hardware point of view. Modeling the dynamic relationships of distributed systems and applications with such a model is hard if not impossible. Therefore we propose a new information model that focuses on the dynamic description of distributed systems. By using object-oriented technologies such as a prototype-instance model, it is well suited for the actual demands of system administration. Since we do not explicitly combine it with a particular distribution mechanism, it is orthogonal to any given or future communication model. We present an exemplary case study in the analysis to our approach, and we describe the design and implementation of our model.