Network management by delegation

Abstract

Network management systems built on a client/server model centralize responsibilities in client manager processes, with server agents playing restrictive support roles. As a result, managers must micro-manage agents through primitive steps, resulting in ineffective distribution of management responsibilities, failure-prone management bottlenecks, and limitations for real time responsiveness. We present a more flexible paradigm, the Manager-Agent Delegation (MAD) framework. It supports the ability to extend the functionality of servers (agents) at execution time, allowing flexible distribution of management responsibilities in a distributed environment. MAD can store and instantiate delegated scripts, and provides a concurrent runtime environment, where they can execute asynchronously without requiring the manager's intervention. A delegation protocol allows a manager to transfer programs, create process instances, and control their execution. We describe the delegation model, its application to network management, and the design of a prototype implementation.