Auto-Discovery Capabilities for Service Management: An ISP Case Study
Srinivas Ramanathan
19, Fourth Street
Abirampuram, Chennai
India
Email: srinivas_ramanathan_AT_yahoo.com
Deborah L. Caswell
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
MS. 1U-17
1501 Page Mill Rd.
Palo Alto, CA 94304
Email: caswell_AT_hpl.hp.com
Scott S. Neal
Agilent Technologies
4380 Ziegler Road MS-ISP
Fort Collins, CO 80525
Email: scott_neal_AT_agilent.com
Abstract
Auto-discovery is one of the key technologies that enables
management systems to be quickly customized to the environments that
they are intended to manage. As Internet services have grown in
complexity in recent years, it is no longer sufficient to monitor and
manage these services in isolation. Instead, it is critical that
management systems discover dependencies that exist among Internet
services, and use this knowledge for correlation of measurement
results, so as to determine the root-causes of problems. While most
existing management systems have focussed on discovery of host,
servers, and network elements in isolation, in this paper we describe
auto-discovery techniques that discover relationships among
services. Since new Internet services and service elements are being
deployed at a rapid pace, it is essential that the discovery
methodologies be implemented in an extensible manner, so that new
discovery capabilities can be incrementally added to the management
system. In this paper, we present an extensible architecture for
auto-discovery and describe a prototype implementation of this
architecture and associated auto-discovery techniques. We also
highlight experiences from applying these techniques to discover
real-world ISP systems. Although described in the context of ISP
systems, the concepts described in this paper are applicable for the
discovery of services and inter-service relationships in enterprise
systems as well.
Keywords: Service management, Auto-discovery, Service models, Internet services
JNSM: Vol. 8, No. 4, 2000
Auto-Discovery Capabilities for Service Management: An ISP Case Study [Vol. 8, No. 4, 2000]
NOTE: only abstract of paper available on-line; please contact your library or the authors for the full paper
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