Towards a programmable agent-based distributed architecture for enterprise application and service management

The popularization of electronic commerce and the growing use of this business modality by companies as well as the growth in the number of applications, protocols and services that are executed in computer networks generate difficulties for management tools. Most of these tools are able to monitor a previously established set of protocols; monitoring new protocols becomes possible with updated firmware or through development kits that are hard for network managers to assimilate. Additionally, these tools usually have little or no ability to act automatically when facing unexpected behaviors from these protocols. This paper presents an architecture for distributed management of enterprise networked applications, high-layer protocols and network services based an programmable agents. By means of a high-level graphical and textual language, the network manager is able to specify protocol traces in order to perform FCAPS (fault, configuration, accounting, performance and security) management. The observation of these traces in the network traffic leads to actions which are also determined by the network manager. This paper describes the language used to specify traces, the architecture and some examples of applications that validate the proposal.