Towards Self-Configuring Policy-Based Management Systems

One challenge in the automation of policy-based management (PBM) systems is to bridge the gap between specifying policies and realizing them in the actual implementation of a management system, which makes use of those policies. Systems as well as policies change dynamically. This paper introduces a PBM System Architecture that can automatically map the specified policy elements to be realized and enforced by a management system. The proposed model emphasizes the services, algorithms and mechanisms needed to efficiently identify and automatically deploy management entities and be able to respond to both changes to the system itself as well as to changes in the way the system is to be managed, i.e., changes to the set of management policies or sets of management agents. The proposed management systems structure may be one key to automating resource-efficient implementation of policies for PBM systems.