Reducing coupling in distributed management frameworks

Existing management applications for distributed systems can suffer from tight coupling with the subsystems they manage making them sensitive to system change. We identify and provide definitions for the forms and types of coupling present in management applications and identify the relationships between them. We use this qualitative view of coupling to demonstrate how coupling manifests itself in management applications based on current technologies. A new framework for distributed applications called the Distributed Management Framework (DMF) is introduced and is shown to reduce the identified kinds of coupling.