Managing the management: CORBA-based instrumentation of management systems

In liberalized (tele)communication markets, the goal of integrated management has become particularly demanding because now an arbitrary number of service providers need to dynamically exchange customer- and technology-related data. In this context, management systems are crucial for seamless interworking because they contain the management information that has to be shared between service providers: on the one hand, different service providers have chosen different management systems that are bound to specific, standardized management architectures and, due to the heterogeneity of the underlying frameworks, do not interoperate easily. Solutions for achieving interoperability between heterogeneous frameworks are one key factor towards integrated enterprise management and have been studied in the past. On the other hand, the provisioning of management instrumentation for the management systems themselves (i.e., the problem "how to manage the management") is still an open research question. The paper presents a novel approach to this problem by defining a MIB for management systems. It can be regarded as a step towards integrated enterprise management and is based on the viewpoint languages and concepts of RM-ODP; generic management models for distributed applications can then be refined to handle the specifics of management systems. A CORBA-based prototype implementation for managing management systems illustrates the applicability of our concepts.