Implementation of distributed systems management policies: a framework for the application of intelligent agent technology

As today's businesses become more dependent on their networks and computing infrastructure for service delivery, failures in that infrastructure translate into business losses. Mechanisms are needed to control the behaviour of the ever more complex and heterogeneous distributed computing infrastructure. Management policies, derived from business goals and objectives, give structure to the use of technology and promise to add significant value to the management of today's complex distributed computing environments. Due to the intelligent agent concept's ability to facilitate the delegation of management functionality to autonomous agents operating on behalf of a management application, this has become one of the key technologies envisaged to realise the vision of distributed systems management. A framework for applying the concept of intelligent agents, as extensively defined within the AI community, to implement systems management policies, is proposed. A number of new concepts and mechanisms to facilitate the implementation are introduced.