Towards Automating the Adaptation of Management Systems to Changes in Policies

The goal of distributed systems management is to provide reliable, secure and efficient utilization of the network, processors and devices that comprise those systems. The management system makes use of management agents to collect events and data from managed objects while policies provide information on how to modify the behaviour of a management system. Systems, as well as policies governing the behaviour of the system and its constituents, change dynamically. This paper explores the services needed to efficiently identify and deploy management entities and be able to respond to a change in the system being managed or in changes to the policies being applied. We show how these services can be built on existing management services found in commercial management systems