http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1925810
ABSTRACT. Network management systems built on a client/server model centralize responsibilities in client manager processes, with server agents playing restrictive support roles. As a result, managers must micro-manage agents through primitive steps, resulting in ineffective distribution of management responsibilities, failure-prone management bottlenecks, and limitations for real time responsiveness.
We present a more flexible paradigm, the Manager-Agent Delegation (MAD) framework. It supports the ability to extend the functionality of servers (agents) at execution time, allowing flexible distribution of management responsibilities in a distributed environment. MAD can store and instantiate delegated scripts, and provides a concurrent runtime environment, where they can execute asynchronously without requiring the manager’s intervention.
A delegation protocol allows a manager to transfer programs, create process instances, and control their execution. We describe the delegation model, its application to network management, and the design of a prototype implementation.
Unfortunately, typical networked systems have not been designed to be manageable . The management problem presents a broad range of non-trivial technical challenges. … The technical problems involved in accomplishing manageability are not yet fully understood and so their research is still in an embryonic stage.
Paradigms for
distributed computing fix the functionality of processes atcompilation time
These problems are compounded as networks become faster and more complex, an d require distribution of management function.
We here present a more flexible paradigm , which supports the ability
to
a flexible and responsive management strategy by receiving and executing delegated programs that monitor and control objects in its local environment.
micro-management, that is, when the manager must control the execution of a program or script by stepping the agent through it.
Since all management functions must be centralised into th e manager, it is rendered most vulnerable to network failures as even simple failures could load its bandwidth and cycles, bringing it down. Once the manager is down, local agents cannot accomplish recovery, as they must wait for instructions. Thus, even a minor failure may potentially lead to an avalanche failure of the management system.
A Management Scripting Language (MSL) is used to encode management programs to be delegated from managers to agents .