Mapping Policies to Management Systems

Policies have been identified as one possible way to specify to management systems the operational constraints of a system or systems being managed. Such policies, often characterized as event-triggered condition actions rules, are frequently defined via policy languages and or user interface tools in order to simplify their expression and understanding by system administrators. The underlying assumption is that these policies are then mapped to computational elements of some underlying management system capable of monitoring system behavior, identifying key events, executing rules, typically through agents. One of the challenges with this approach is how to map such policies to these underlying management system elements, how to identify agents that are to be used or agents that could be reused. This problem also arises when the managed system changes, e.g. through the start of a new application, i.e., how should the management system adapt? In this paper we describe an approach for this automation. Our solution makes use of template-based mapping of policies to an underlying management system, in our case, Tivoli. Some examples of the prototype are provided to illustrate its operation.