SERVICE SUPPORTING MANAGEMENT OF DISTRIBUTED APPLICATIONS AND SYSTEMS

A distributed computing system consists of heterogeneous competing dev ices, communication networks, operating system services, and applicati ons, As organisations move toward distributed computing environments, there will be a corresponding growth in distributed applications centr al to the enterprise. The design, development, and management of distr ibuted applications presents many difficult challenges. As these syste ms grow to hundreds or even thousands of devices and similar or greate r magnitude of software components, if will became increasingly diffic ult to manage them without appropriate support fools and frameworks. F urther, the design and deployment of additional applications and servi ces will be, at best, ad hoc without modelling fools and timely data a n which to base design and configuration decisions. This paper present s a framework for management of distributed applications and systems. The framework is based on a set of common management services that sup port management activities. The services include monitoring, control, configuration, and data repository services. A prototype system built on the framework is described that implements and integrates managemen t applications providing visualisation, fault location, performance mo nitoring and modelling, and configuration management. The prototype al so demonstrates how various management services can be implemented.