The abstraction and modelling of management agents

Management agents play an important role in distributed systems and network manage­ment. Agents are used to gather information, create, delete, and change the state of managed objects, and forward notifications of events from managed objects to managers. All manage­ment agents perform the same basic operations, yet there is no precise specification of the ca­pabilities and architecture of generic management agents. As a result, developing management agents at present is difficult and time-consuming This paper presents the design of a generic management agent and describes the architecture and service interface of such an agent. We also present an implementation of a management agent creation tool for automating the creation of management agents (CMIP, SNMP and other) which all bear the generic agent architecture. The use of this tool greatly reduces the time needed, and therefore the cost of developing man­agement agents.

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