OSI system and application management: an experience in a public administration context

This paper describes an OSI system and application management system, built for an Italian Public Administration Department to manage over 100 geographically distributed sites. Controlled resources cover both system resources and user application services. All resources have been modelled through GDMO specifications. GDMO specifications of system resources have been built considering preliminary output work from the OSF management SIG (Unapproved draft, 1993) and the DSIS requirements specification. Manager and agent applications have been built on a common, generalized platform, the core management services platform (CMS), providing access to general management functionalities through a common event-based application program interface (API). Agent or manager applications developed on top of the CMS just need to cope with message dispatching, data transformation and non-standard management issues. CMS automatically manages some ISO/OSI standard managed object classes (MOCs) defined in ISO/IEC IS 10164 family standards, and provides the user with facilities to design and handle user defined MOCs with ease. CMS encapsulates communication and addressing issues, presenting the concept of a management session between management applications, allowing addressing through application entity title "aliases", and handling abstract syntax in such a way as to simplify development of (object-oriented) management applications.