A Survey of Distributed Enterprise Network and Systems Management Paradigms

Since the mid 1990s, network and systemsmanagement has steadily evolved from centralizedparadigms, where the management application runs on asingle management station, to distributed paradigms,where it is distributed over many nodes. In thissurvey, our goal is to classify all these paradigms,especially the new ones, in order to help network andsystems administrators design a management application, and choose between mobile code, distributedobjects, intelligent agents, etc. Step by step, we buildan enhanced taxonomy based on four criteria: thedelegation granularity, the semantic richness of the information model, the degree of specificationof a task, and the degree of automation ofmanagement.