Making distributed applications manageable through instrumentation

The goal of a management system in a distributed computing environment is to provide a centralized and coordinated view of an otherwise distributed and heterogeneous collection of hardware and software resources. The management software will, within a policy framework, monitor, analyse and control network resources, system resources, and distributed application programs. In our research, we are primarily concerned with the management of distributed applications. Of particular interest is how distributed application processes can be made manageable. The work described in the current paper focusses on instrumenting these processes to allow them to respond to management requests, generate management reports, and maintain information required by the management system. We present an instrumentation architecture to support this, and discuss a prototype implementation based on it. This prototype 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.