Towards CORBA-based enterprise management: managing CORBA-based systems with SNMP platforms

Apart from the well established OSI/TMN and Internet management architectures, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is increasingly considered as a promising framework for Enterprise Management. On the downside, management platforms being able to survey and control management agents via CORBA are still hard to find on the market while SNMP-based platforms are in widespread use. The consensus on the advantages of CORBA for managing complex system infrastructures and applications exacerbates the need to open well-established management platforms for CORBA. This paper will present a feasible and practical approach to this problem: it allows the extension of existing SNMP-based management platforms for managing CORBA-compliant agents without the need of modifying already existing platform code. Thus, it can be considered as a step towards CORBA-based Enterprise Management by ensuring the interoperability of heterogeneous management architectures. Key to our approach is the creation of a conceptually integrated management information base on the platform side where management-related information is collected and evaluated independent of the originating base architecture. The work described in this paper can be considered as a case-study on the seamless integration of legacy systems into emerging distributed object environments