The trend towards service-oriented computing has implications on the area of IT management. While traditionally management of networks and systems has dominated research as well as industrial applications, the focus is now turning to service management. One of the key concepts of integrated management is the management information base (MIB), the composite of management information. While a number of standardized MIBs have been devised in the area of network and systems management, a comprehensive MIB for service management is still missing. The PhD thesis presented in this paper aims at filling this gap by specifying semantic-rich and business-oriented service management information.
With service-oriented computing becoming widely accepted by the industry, the number of commercial deployments is steadily increasing. The success of these deployments largely depends on the providers’ ability to efficiently manage their IT infrastructure. To meet this requirement service providers deploy a wide array of hardware and software to deliver and manage services to their customers. Each management application deals with a certain facet of service management and therefore uses valuable data as key to its operation. The resulting situation is that information about services needs to be widely and electronically shared across departments throughout the provider’s enterprise - and with partners and suppliers.
Such information is part of a Management Information Base (MIB), one of the key
concepts of integrated management. The MIB contains the definition of the entities that
are managed (managed objects), including their properties, their permissible behavior,
and the operations that may be performed upon them [
While a number of modeling frameworks for service management information have been devised, they currently show deficiencies regarding description of common service properties. The PhD thesis presented in this paper aims at addressing this gap with the concept of a Service Management Information Base (SMIB). The SMIB approach aims at specifying semantic-rich, business-oriented service management information. This includes common service management attributes as well as association information between services and resources.
In Section 2 a typical service provisioning scenario is presented in order to derive requirements for a Service MIB. Related work in this area is discussed in Section 3 and juxtaposed to the identified requirements. Section 4 introduces the SMIB approach and presents the further steps to be taken in the PhD thesis. 2
The Web Hosting Service offered by the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ)
serves as an example IT service (see
Figure 1). The LRZ operates the
scientific network in Munich and hosts
web sites for other research
institutions. Figure 1 shows a simplified
view of the service incorporating three Loadb
main components: an array of web routers
servers, a global filesystem (AFS), and
a database. In addition, network
components need to be considered for
management (Loadb routers, Nx-switches). Nx-switches
The management systems respectively
MIBs employed by the LRZ provide
means to manage networks and
applications, but do not take into account
services or dependencies between
services and resources.Yet, that
knowledge has to be deduced by systems
administrators and maintained
separately. It therefore often lacks
formalization and is usually not reusable. Webservers
Thus, a comprehensive service
management repository is required to
enable consistent management. The
challenges stemming from that requirement AFS-Filesystem
can be further categorized into
specification of service attributes and
formalization of service resource dependencies.
Traditionally, management information has been defined from a vendors’ perspective
and was therefore often restricted to information that could be easily obtained by
instrumenting components [
Alignment to providers’ informaBMugsminte.ss SLA Mapinformation itpinloognytenodeaecpdopsnltiTaciahnteioiMnnfsIoBramsndactuinroernetwnptoleyrrkteaimenl--
ements. Examples for such data are ApplicatioMnaMnSaaegnreavmgiceeemntent SeMrvIBice Mapinformation tteohhtrsies,httnmthupema-ryCebqePsurUuefsofitlfscoeapdderforropofspmeeacdoawnIdePn.besWtepwrahvocierklrke-,
Application MIB and systems management point of NetMwoarnkagaendmeSnytstems Network MIB view, service management requires abstracted and enriched data that reflects the providers’ information needs. That is, information needed Fig. 2. Management Pyramid to deliver the service according to the objectives set up in service level agreements (SLAs).This includes information relating to the quality level of the service, to the customers having subscribed to the service, or the impact of service failures on the business.
Administrative domains Application scenarios like dynamic service provisioning or Grid computing require services to be composed in a highly dynamic and flexible manner, thereby crossing organizational boundaries. Accordingly, the ServiceMIB must provide capabilites to encompass different management domains and therefore allow to present different views on service management information according to the needs of the involved organizations.
The functional areas of management, usually classified by the OSI FCAPS, dissect the whole complex of management. Yet, management information is shared between different functional areas, e.g., service usage information is a prerequisite for accounting as well as fault management. Consequently, all of these areas should be included in a ServiceMIB that purports to deal with service management.
The service lifecycle usually consists of a planning, negotiation, provisioning, operation/change, and withdrawal phase. Since management information is propagated and enriched among these phases, the ServiceMIB must accommodate all phases. 2.2
Service management relies on knowledge regarding dependencies between services and
resources. In particular, dependencies are the key to service problem resolution in that
they provide a foundation for determining causality [
In this section prominent representative work in the area of management information
modeling is presented and its significance in the focus of this paper is discussed.
Common Information Model (CIM) The Common Information Model [
Web Services Distributed Management Two complementary specifications have been
presented by the Oasis Web Services Distributed Management technical committee:
Management Using Web Services (MUWS) deals with providing a common
management interface for distributed IT resources, whereas Management of Web Services
(MOWS) introduces the application of the former onto Web Services [
NGOSS SID As part of the New Generation Operations Systems and Software
(NGOSS) program the TeleManagement Forum released a Shared Information/Data
(SID) model [
Internet Information Model The IETF model revolves traditionally around the Simple
Network Management Protocol (SNMP) [
The Service MIB approach aims at specifying semantic-rich, business-oriented service
attributes as well as association information between service and resources. It therefore
consists of two main steps, that are aligned with the challenges presented in Section 2:
Specification of business-oriented service attributes In recent time, service
management has been influenced by the strong trend towards process-orientation.
Processoriented frameworks contribute to that trend in that they provide guidance for
enterprises striving to deploy IT service management processes. A prominent example for
such a framework is the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL has been introduced
by the British Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and provides a collection of
best practices for IT processes in the area of IT service management [
To facilitate the definition of service attributes we leverage a use-case driven approach. The main idea is to analyze ITIL service management processes in order to derive common service attributes. Since such processes essentially represent a specification for service management tasks, they provide a comprehensive collection of use cases that can be further utilized to derive service management information needs. This approach offers considerable benefits with respect to the requirements denoted in Section 1. Since ITIL constitutes a business-driven approach to IT service management, it already takes lifecyle and interorganizational aspects into account, while at the same time offering a sufficient level of genericity.
Example: The Incident Management Process deals with restoring normal service
operation. One of the core activities within this process is the classification of incidents,
consisting of e.g., priorization of incidents. To support this activity, service management
information relating to the business impact of the incident is required. That is, the SLA
associated with the service, the impact on related services, or affected users.
Formalization of service-resource dependencies Formalization of association
information regarding services and resources requires high expressive power that cannot be
expressed by single attributes. Instead, a more complex formalism needs to be employed
that allows to specify associations on a per-attribute basis in a functional manner. This
includes means to map information defined for network and systems to ServiceMIB
attributes. Therefore, this issue has been approached with a declarative language to
specify service-resource dependencies, called Service Information Specification
Language (SISL). This concept has been presented in [
Previous work in the context of the incident and problem management processes has
analyzed use-cases in the area of service-oriented event correlation and impact analysis
[
The author wishes to thank the members of the Munich Network Management (MNM) Team for helpful discussions and valuable comments on previous versions of this paper. The MNM Team directed by Prof. Dr. Heinz-Gerd Hegering is a group of researchers of the University of Munich, the Munich University of Technology, and the Leibniz Supercomputing Center of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Its web–server is located at http://www.mnm-team.org.