Managing distributed systems using OSI systems management

Management systems are needed in order to guarantee the reliability, availability and performance of distributed software applications. One of the important requirements for a management system is that it should be easy to develop, so that developers do not spend an inordinate amount of time making their applications manageable. Also, management systems should be based on open management standards, providing standard interfaces to enable the development of plug-and-play management applications, which is something of utmost importance in today's multi-vendor environment. In this paper, we present an architecture for an end-to-end management system for managing large distributed software systems, based on OSI systems management standards. We also show how a lot of the complexity of OSI management implementation can be hidden from the developers.