Optimizing Management Functions 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 systems. Despite the significant contributions made towards the development of management tools that monitor and control distributed systems, little has been done to address issues such as optimizing the execution of management functions with respect to system and management requirements. This paper presents a management optimization model in which management agents and managed objects are efficiently configured on the basis of a set of system and management requirements. We illustrate our model and describe its implementation through a Branch- and Bound-based algorithm and a web-based interface. The latter enables users to specify the requirements used by the optimization algorithm to determine efficient management configurations. It also includes an XML-based interface through which management agents can be started independent of the underlying platforms. Performance characteristics of the proposed algorithm as well as experimental results to illustrate the validity of the model are also described.