This overview of Systems Management architecture points out the relationship of management functions, managed objects and the underlying communication protocols to functional areas.
It summarizes concepts taken from OSI Reference Model - Management Framework as defined in [ISO-7498-4], OSI System Management Overview as defined in [ISO-10040] and TMN as defined in the [CCITT M.30].
The three main groupings for specifying the Systems Management are:
A systems management function is a set of related services which provides for the manipulation of Managed Objects to accomplish a specific purpose of systems management. For example, Object Management Function provides the ability to create, delete, examine and change Managed Objects. Another example is State Management Function, which provides the ability to examine changes in state and the ability to monitor overall operability of Managed Objects.
A systems management function may satisfy more than one requirement and to satisfy some requirements, more than one systems management function may be applicable. Therefore, a many-to-many relationship between functions and requirements exist.
A managed object is the management view of a resource that is subject to management, such as a layer entity, a connection or an item of physical communication equipment. Thus, a managed object is the abstraction of such a resource that presents its properties as seen by (and for the purpose of) management. An essential part of the definition of a managed object is the relationship between these properties and the operational behavior of the resource. Part of the definition of a managed object is the specification of the set of management operations that can be performed upon it and the effect that these management operations have upon the managed object and its attributes. Managed objects can also emit notifications, which contain information concerning the occurrence of an event associated with the managed object.
The interactions between management system and managed system are realized through the exchange of management information. The rules governing these interactions are the management communication protocols. Management Functions and Managed Objects are components of the communication protocol.
The requirements to be satisfied by systems management activities can be categorized into five functional areas:
In performing management activities, sets of management functions may be combined to fulfill a particular functional area requirement. Similarly, managed objects are general in the sense that they may be used to fulfill requirements in more than one functional area. Managed objects, their associated management operations and the communication protocols are known to be common to more than one area.
In general, the managed system - agent - cannot determine the purpose of the management operations it receives or the notifications that it emits. For example, a managed system cannot in general determine whether its responses to read error counters requests will be used for the purpose of fault management or performance management. The managed system responds to requests from a manager individually, without needing any wider context within which to carry out the request.
In general, driving the design of the managed system - agent - based on functional area requirements is a mistake.