Making distributed applications manageable through instrumentation

The goal of a management system in a distributed computing environment is t o provide a centralized and coordinated view of an otherwise distributed an d heterogeneous collection of hardware and software resources. The manageme nt software will, within a policy framework, monitor, analyse and control n etwork resources, system resources, and distributed application programs. In our research, we are primarily concerned with the management of distribu ted applications. Of particular interest is how distributed application pro cesses can be made manageable. The work described in the current paper focu sses on instrumenting these processes to allow them to respond to managemen t requests, generate management reports, and maintain information required by the management system. We present an instrumentation architecture to sup port this, and discuss a prototype implementation based on it. This prototy pe was used to experiment with the management of DCE applications in an OSI -based management environment. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.