2.1 Generic Application Managed Object Classes (GAMOCs)

 As mentioned above, in other areas such as in network management a common understanding exists about the resources that have to be administered. In OSI management, so-called Generic Managed Object Classes (GMOCs, e.g. a class connection-mode protocol machine) have been specified and then refined to more specialized classes (e.g. connection-oriented transport protocol machine). A similar concept lies behind the Network Services Monitoring MIB (see RFC 1565), in this case however restricted to monitoring purposes. For application management, such a generally agreed upon set of MOCs does not yet exist, although some valuable approaches can be found in recent publications (e.g. (Schade et al., 1996)).

Therefore, we propose a ``universe of discourse'' for application management that is aligned with the standardized concepts contained in the ODP viewpoint languages (ISO 10746, Part 3: Architecture). Analyzing the concepts from a management point of view reveals that the Computational and the Engineering Language are of highest relevance for our purposes, i.e. these concepts define most of the resources that have to be managed. Concepts from the Information Language that cover semantics of information processing, are only of secondary concern for (technical) management. Since integrated management should abstract from the technical realization of the managed resources as far as possible, this also holds for the Technology Language. Furthermore it applies to concepts from the Enterprise Language. The enterprise viewpoint has to be reconsidered if advanced management concepts like policy-based management are introduced (Neumair and Wies, 1996).

Therefore a subset of the viewpoint concepts from a management point of view gives rise to the Generic Application Managed Object Classes (GAMOCs) which are a new approach presented herein.

Concepts of the computational language allow the functional decomposition of an ODP system into objects which interact at interfaces. Therefore, MOCs based on them, e.g. operation interface, signal interface or binding are important for software distribution and installation. An engineering specification defines the mechanisms and functions required to support distributed interaction between objects in an ODP system. Concepts of the engineering language like capsule, cluster, channel etc. or, respectively, the GAMOCs derived from them, support - as can be seen easily - monitoring of processes, the connections between them etc., i.e. dynamic or runtime aspects of application management. They can therefore be used e.g. for performance monitoring and fault management. See also Figure 3.

  

Figure 3: Examples of Generic Application MOCs (GAMOCs)