Services supporting management of distributed applications and systems

Abstract

A distributed computing system consists of heterogeneous computing devices, communication networks, operating system services, and applications. As organisations move toward distributed computing environments, there will be a corresponding growth in distributed applications central to the enterprise. The design, development, and management of distributed applications presents many difficult challenges. As these systems grow to hundreds or even thousands of devices and similar or greater magnitude of software components, it will become increasingly difficult to manage them without appropriate support tools and frameworks. Further, the design and deployment of additional applications and services will be, at best, ad hoc without modelling tools and timely data on which to base design and configuration decisions. This paper presents a framework for management of distributed applications and systems. The framework is based on a set of common management services that support 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 management applications providing visualisation, fault location, performance monitoring and modelling, and configuration management. The prototype also demonstrates how various management services can be implemented.