Policies in network and systems management—Formal definition and architecture

The task of managing information technology resources becomes increasingly complex as managers must take heterogeneous systems, different networking technologies, and distributed applications into consideration. As the number of resources to be managed grows, the task of managing these devices and applications depends on numerous system and vendor specific issues. To prevent the operators from drowning in excessive detail, the level of abstraction needs to be raised in order to hide system and network specifics. Policies that are derived from the goals of management define the desired behavior of distributed heterogeneous systems and networks, and specify means to enforce this behavior. A formal definition of policies is presented and examples of policies from network and systems management are given to illustrate the concept. An architecture is introduced to show how a policy system can be realized.