Classification and computation of dependencies for distributed management

This paper addresses the role of dependency analysis in distributed management. The identification of dependencies becomes increasingly important in today's networked environments because applications and services rely on a variety of supporting services which might be outsourced to a service provider. However, service dependencies are not made explicit in today's systems, thus making the task of problem determination particularly difficult. Solving this problem requires the determination and computation of the dependencies between services and applications. A key contribution of the paper is a methodology for making IP-based services and applications manageable that have not been designed to include management instrumentation (which is the case today for almost every application and service). Unlike other approaches, it is not necessary to modify the application code. Instead our approach yields a technique that enumerates the characteristics and interdependencies of applications and services, thus permitting the derivation of appropriate management information.