A model for efficient configuration of management agents in distributed systems

With the increased availability and complexity of distributed systems comes a greater need for solutions to assist in the management of distributed system components. Despite the significant contributions made towards the development of management tools that monitor and control distributed systems, little has been done towards formally defining management systems and the requirements to be satisfied by these systems. In this paper, we model three main aspects of achieving efficiency in distributed systems management: (i) the need for minimising resource consumption by management, (ii) the need to satisfy system and application requirements, and (iii) the need for dynamic solutions. We also present experimental results that illustrate the scalability and validity of our model.