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Last modified: February 24, 2006
Web Services Distributed Management

Note: In February 2003 the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management Technical Committee was formed to continue the work of the previous OASIS Management Protocol TC. Its redirected charter is to "define web services management. This includes using web services architecture and technology to manage distributed resources. This TC will also develop the model of a web service as a manageable resource. This TC will collaborate with various evolving activities within other standards groups, including, but not limited to, DMTF (working with its technical work groups regarding relevant CIM Schema), GGF (on the OGSA common resource model and OGSI regarding infrastructure), and W3C (the web services architecture committee). Also liaison with other OASIS TCs, including the security TC and other management oriented TCs." See the Call for Participation in February 2003, "OASIS TC Call for Participation: WSDM TC (DistributedMgmt)."

[February 23, 2005]   OASIS Ballots WSDM Specification for Approval as an OASIS Standard.    The OASIS WSDM Technical Committee has submitted its Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) Committee Draft Specification Version 1.0 to the Consortium membership for approval as an OASIS Standard. The OASIS WSDM TC was chartered to "define web services management, including using web services architecture and technology to manage distributed resources. Its goal is to develop the model of a web service as a manageable resource, collaborating with evolving activities within other standards groups including DMTF, GGF, the W3C web services architecture, and other OASIS TCs." The approved WSDM Committee Draft Specification 1.0 now being balloted includes both Management Using Web Services (WSDM-MUWS) and Management of Web Services (WSDM-MOWS). MUWS "defines how an Information Technology resource connected to a network provides manageability interfaces such that the IT resource can be managed locally and from remote locations using Web services technologies. MUWS is composed of two parts: MUWS Part 1 and provides the fundamental concepts for management using Web services. MUWS Part 2 provides specific messaging formats used to enable the interoperability of MUWS implementations." Although MUWS Part 2 has a dependency upon Part 1, MUWS Part 1 is independent of Part 2. MUWS Part 1 provides a sample list of types of management capabilities exposed by MUWS: they are "the management capabilities generally expected in systems that manage distributed IT resources; examples of manageability functions that can be performed via MUWS include monitoring the quality of a service, enforcing a service level agreement, controlling a task, and managing a resource lifecycle." Design of the Management of Web Services (MOWS) specification is based on a recognition that "web services form a logical network which may span enterprise boundaries. Managing such logical networks is critical for organizations that use Web services to automate and integrate various internal functions, and deal with partners and clients electronically. To manage the Web services network, one needs to manage the components that form the network, viz., the Web services endpoints. The WSDM Management of Web Services (MOWS) specification addresses management of the Web services endpoints using Web services protocols. It is based on the concepts and definitions expressed in the Management Using Web Services specification (MUWS). The WSDM specification has been tested in real implementations. Certification by OASIS member organizations that they are successfully using the WSDM specification consistently with the OASIS IPR Policy have been received from Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, International Business Machines, Amberpoint, and TIBCO Software. OASIS Sponsor Members represented on the WSDM TC include Actional Corp, BEA Systems, BMC Software, CA, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Novell, Oracle, and TIBCO.

[December 13, 2004]   OASIS WSDM TC Approves Web Services Distributed Management Specs for Public Review.    Committee drafts for OASIS Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) TC specifications have been released for public review. Comments are solicited from all interested parties through January 10, 2005. The public review is open to all potential users, developers and stakeholders, intended to improve the interoperability and quality of the WSDM specifications. The WSDM Technical Committee has produced two companion specifications for Web Services Distributed Management. Management Using Web Services (MUWS) defines how management of any resource can be accessed via Web services protocols. Management of Web Services (WSDM-MOWS), based on the concepts and definitions expressed in MUWS, addresses the management of the Web services endpoints using Web services protocols. The Management Using Web Services (MUWS) 1.0 specification, in two parts, "defines how to express the following manageability capabilities: identity, metrics, resource state, status, configuration, name correlation, and relationships. MUWS defines standard descriptive techniques for each of these including required base properties, operations, and notifications, as well as required metadata for each of these to aid introspection. MUWS 1.0 also defines standard management event formats to enhance interoperability and correlateability. It defines how to provide secure management. In addition MUWS 1.0 defines recommendations and interfaces for advertising and discovering resources." OASIS sponsor level members supporting development of the specification through representation on the WSDM Technical Committee include: Actional Corporation; BEA Systems, Inc; BMC Software; Computer Associates; Dell; Fujitsu; Hewlett-Packard; Hitachi; IBM; Novell; Oracle; Tibco; and webMethods, Inc.

[August 01, 2002] "The purpose of the Management Protocol TC is to develop open industry standard management protocols to provide a web-based mechanism to monitor and control managed elements in a distributed environment based on industry accepted management models, methods, and operations, including, OMI, XML, SOAP, DMTF CIM, and DMTF CIM Operations. This work will help consolidate and deliver an industry standards protocol for managing desktops, services, and networks across an enterprise or internet environments." The TC members proposed to create a published Management Protocol Specification by June 2003. [website 2002-08-01]

WSDM TC Proposers and Initial Members:

Management Protocol TC members. The TC Chair was Winston Bumpus (Novell). Initial supporters of the TC proposal included:

Principal References (OASIS WSDM TC)

Working Documents

  • [February 25, 2006] An Introduction to WSDM. Committee Draft, produced by members of the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) TC. Edited by Vaughn Bullard (AmberPoint, Inc), Bryan Murray (Hewlett-Packard), and Kirk Wilson (Computer Associates International). February 24, 2006. 26 pages. "The WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management) standard is more than a management protocol, SNMP trap handler, or simple distributed management technology. As a standard, it seeks to unify management infrastructures by providing a vendor, platform, network, and protocol neutral framework for enabling management technologies to access and receive notifications of management-enabled resources. Though built upon a standardized suite of XML specifications, it provides features to enable resources that other proprietary management technologies do not. It can be used to standardize management for many devices, from network management devices as well as consumer electronic devices, such as televisions, digital video disc players, and PDAs. This Introduction to WSDM provides an overview to the WSDM specification and its associated sub-specifications. The introduction is directed towards a wide audience of architects, developers, systems and software integration specialists and users. In addition, the introduction covers the historical motivations for the creation of WSDM as well as the motivations for why would want to use WSDM as a management specification within their information technology environment. The introduction provides simple examples of how WSDM can be used in end devices to give the reader ideas of how the WSDM standard can be used in the real world. The document does not provide a definitive source of the WSDM specification, but is intended to provide an easily read and understood summary of the fundamentals of creating and using WSDM-compliant management applications and manageable resources..." See also the Primer (below) and the Primer XML files. [Source: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/16893/wsdm-introduction-cd.doc, cache.]

  • [February 25, 2006] Web Services Distributed Management: MUWS Primer. Committee Draft, produced by members of the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) TC. Edited by Bryan Murray (Hewlett-Packard), Kirk Wilson (Computer Associates), and Mark Ellison (Ellison Software Consulting). February 24, 2006. 107 pages. "The Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) MUWS Primer provides an introduction to the WSDM MUWS specifications directed towards a wide audience of architects, developers, implementers and users. After reading this primer, the reader should be prepared to understand and implement the MUWS standard and the specification supporting the MUWS standard, such as WS-ResourceProperties and WS-BaseNotification. The primary goal of the WSDM primer is to provide the reader with examples and to explain the use of the WSDM standards to achieve Information Technology (IT) management goals. This primer addresses the experienced developer or architect wishing to learn how to construct the necessary XML documents related to MUWS, including XML schema, WSDL, and SOAP messages supporting the MUWS message exchange patterns (MEPs). A basic familiarity with the MUWS and MOWS specifications is assumed. Explanations of concepts covered in the MUWS and MOWS specifications are generally not repeated in this document. This document will provide concrete examples of how the necessary XML documents specified by MUWS are constructed. It helps the reader understand which elements must be included in a particular document in order to achieve a desired goal. While the WSDM specifications provide an abstract description of necessary XML documents, this primer provides concrete illustrations of those XML documents. The reader should observe that neither the WSDM specifications nor this primer describe the physical, runtime construction of necessary XML documents as rendered within program code. Choosing an appropriate design and toolkit for the system hosting an implementation of the MUWS MEPs is beyond the scope of this primer." [Source: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/16894/wsdm-primer-muws-cd.doc; cache.]

  • [February 25, 2006] Web Services Distributed Management: MOWS Primer. Committee Draft, produced by members of the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) TC. Edited by Bryan Murray (Hewlett-Packard), Kirk Wilson (Computer Associates), and Mark Ellison (Ellison Software Consulting). February 24, 2006. 44 pages. "MOWS is an extension and application of the WSDM Management Using Web Services (MUWS) specification. MOWS is an extension of MUWS in that MOWS uses and extends the capabilities defined in MUWS. At is simplist level, MOWS uses the same resource properties exposed by MUWS manageability capabilities. For example, the MOWS OperationalStatus capability specifies the same resource property as defined in MUWS. MOWS extends other MUWS manageability capabilities in much the same way as UML classes extend their parent classes. New properties that are special to Web services are added to those properties already defined for MUWS capabilities. For example, the MOWS Metrics capability extends the MUWS Metrics capability with metrics that are appropriate for Web services. MOWS is an application of MUWS in that any MOWS application must also be fully compliant with the MUWS specification. Within MOWS, the MUWS concept of manageable resource, which is treated generally in MUWS as encompassing any kind of resource that is to be managed, is explicitly identified with Web services. Thus, like any MUWS manageable resource, the manageability of a Web service must be associated with a resource properties document, which exposes (at least) the MUWS Identity capability and the ManageabilityCharacteristics capability. Notice that within MOWS, the manageable resource is logically defined, a Web service, rather than a physical device such as a PDA or printer... The Web Services Distributed Management: MOWS Primer provides an introduction to the Management Using Web Services (MOWS) specifications directed towards a wide audience of architects, developers, implementers and users..." [Source: http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/16895/wsdm-primer-mows-cd.doc; cache.]

  • [December 08, 2003] "Management Using Web Services: Architecture." OASIS WSDL TC Working Draft. Version 03. 8-December-2003. Document identifier: 'WSDM-MUWS-Architecture-Draft'. Edited by John DeCarlo (The MITRE Corp) and Zulah Eckert (Hewlett-Packard). Contributor: Igor Sedukhin (Computer Associates). 21 pages. "The MUWS Architecture being addressed in this document consists of the pieces needed for management using Web Services of generic Information Technology resources. This requires that manageability of the manageable resource be presented via Web Services, whether or not the resource is a Web Service itself. The Introduction/Context section (Section 1) placed this work in the larger context of Web Services Architecture and following sections will provide more detail about the components of the MUWS Architecture... The MUWS Architecture being defined consists of the Provider of Manageability via Web Services (which consists of the Web Services endpoint(s), service(s), and interface(s) that expose the manageability capabilities for the manageable resource), the Consumer of Manageability, and other required infrastructure. In addition to providing detailed information on the components that make up the Provider of Manageability, this document will address other items. The following items require specific notes on which parts are in and out of scope for the MUWS Architecture: The Consumer of Manageability (each manager which needs to manage some aspect of a manageable resource using MUWS is a consumer of Manageability). The Consumer must be able to make use of the manageability interface(s) provided by or on behalf of manageable resources. Conventional management applications that do not support MUWS will not be addressed at all in the MUWS Architecture. The Consumer of Manageability, like any Web Service consumer, must be able to send messages to, receive responses from, and possibly receive notifications from the manageability interface. There are no requirements imposed on the use of information received..." [source .DOC]

Related References

  • DMTF Standards and Initiatives

  • DMTF Published Standards and Conformance Documents

  • DMTF Developers' Conference 2002

  • DMTF Common Information Model (CIM)

  • Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM)

  • WBEM FAQ document

  • Open Management Interface (OMI)

  • "SNIA Announces Bluefin SAN Management Specification Using WBEM/MOF/CIM." News item 2002-05023.

  • [March 11, 2005] "A Little Wisdom About WSDM." By Heather Kreger (Lead Architect for Web Services and Management for Standards and Emerging Technologies, IBM). ['Uncover the motivation behind the development of Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) 1.0, a new standard that OASIS just approved. This paper gives you an overview of the specification and shows you some of the key design tenants.'] " The industry has been wrestling with the complexity of managing its business systems for years. This complexity stems from the variety of IT resource providers and application providers that enterprises use to build their business systems. A variety of management systems already co-exist to be able to manage the breadth of resources. Ultimately, this creates a classic integration issue: the problem of management integration. OASIS has just approved a new standard from the Web Services Distributed Management Technical Committee (WSDM) as the first step to solving the management integration problem of Web Services Distributed Management: Management Using Web Services (MUWS) and Web Services Distributed Management: Management of Web Services (MOWS) specifications. WSDM provides significant value to three major groups: (1) Customers with heterogeneous IT environments: WSDM allows management software from different vendors to interoperate more easily, enabling end-to-end and even cross-enterprise management. (2) ISV's producing management software: WSDM provides standards for identifying, inspecting, and modifying characteristics of resources in the IT environment. Management applications can take advantage of these to deliver functionality and increase the number and type of resources that management software can address. Over time this will reduce the cost of such applications and broaden their potential function. (3) Manufacturers of devices: WSDM provides the ability to expose management interfaces using Web services in a standard way, regardless of how the internal instrumentation is done. Any management vendor can use these Web services interfaces, reducing the amount of custom support required. The approval of WSDM as an OASIS standard is of interest to all three groups, as well as industry analysts concerned with systems management or Web services. The WSDM 1.0 specifications lay the foundation for using Web services as a management platform. Now that the specification has been approved, there will be activities to educate the industry and align it with other system management activities. WSDM will continue to evolve in many ways. WSDM will evolve as the specifications it depends on become OASIS and W3C standards. WSDM will evolve as it begins to be applied in the Distributed Management Task Force (DFTM) and other management organizations and adds new functionality to its scope. WSDM will also evolve as the industry sorts out competing and overlapping specifications..."

  • [February 13, 2004] "Practical Application of the Web Services Distributed Management Standard." By Jeffrey Tuck (OpenView Division, Hewlett-Packard). In Web Services Journal (February 05, 2004). "The creation and adoption of "standards" help to bring about interoperability. Within the management area, the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) specification, currently being developed within OASIS, is an attempt to bring about interoperability for the management of distributed computing environments. It essentially defines a protocol for interoperability of management information and capabilities via web services. This article provides you with a few thoughts on how WSDM could be applied in practice, and why this particular initiative is so important in aligning IT and business... standards [are] currently in place for management, such as SNMP, JMX and WMI, to name a few. However, while these standards are effective in managing specific resources within the enterprise, they do not address the management of business processes and the underlying application services they rely on. There is no standard available for expressing the relationships that exist between resources, business processes, and related services. And there is a significant gap for management standards to provide a means to correlate business and IT. The WSDM Technical Committee within OASIS is attempting to address some of these issues. So what exactly is WSDM? In short, the WSDM specification will define WSDL for exposing management information and capabilities. It defines a standard for the management of Web services, as well as defines a standard for management using Web services. Considering the fact that WSDM utilizes Web services to expose management information, applications within the management domain gain all the benefits associated with this type of loosely coupled distributed paradigm in the same way that business applications have. For example, firewall traversal via HTTP for inter-enterprise communication, as well as platform and container neutrality..."

  • [December 08, 2003] "Computer Associates Shows its WSDM." By Matt Villano. In CRN (December 08, 2003). "Computer Associates's newly shipping Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) software is the company's first offering to monitor and manage Web services across an enterprise. Though its solution won't be available in the channel for some time, the Islandia, N.Y.-based firm announced support for the new strategy from a range of industry partners, including BEA, Collaxa, DataPower, Mindreef and Systinet, to name a few. According to Dmitri Tcherevik, CA's vice president of Web Services, the new service incorporates pre-existing solutions for J2EE and .NET, making it a tool designed to manage the services themselves as opposed to the infrastructure that delivers them. He added that the adjoining partner component gives CA a Web Services management solution that can be integrated with a variety of other technologies, enhancing the product's power even more. 'This is a watershed event for CA and the industry as a whole,' Tcherevik told CRN. 'Web services is a popular technology and we wanted in.' Unicenter WSDM joins a handful of tools from smaller startups in providing insight into the performance of Web services, and works with any Web service based on the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) industry standard. Tcherevik explained that by automatically discovering, testing, and monitoring Web services applications, Unicenter WSDM will enable IT organizations to track a range of performance indicators and respond to service interruptions rapidly... Ultimately, this kind of automatic, self-healing network management could lead to CA's entry into the utility computing market. More immediately, however, the new Unicenter offering also will be integrated with products and services from solution providers, allowing customers to mix-and-match functionality depending on their needs. For instance, Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Collaxa will integrate with Unicenter WSDM to manage Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) processes running on the Collaxa BPEL server, while Cambridge, Mass.-based DataPower Technology will embed in-band Unicenter WSDM-compliant monitoring into its Web services security and XML-processing hardware..." See details in the announcement: "CA Ships Innovative Solution to Monitor and Manage Web Services Across and Beyond the Enterprise. Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management Ensures Reliability and Performance for On-Demand Computing."

  • [December 08, 2003] "CA Releases Unicenter Web-Services Management System." By Darryl K. Taft. In eWEEK (December 08, 2003). "Computer Associates on Monday released its Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management system. It manages Web services natively at the service level by monitoring Simple Object Access Protocol messages. Dmitri Tcherevik, vice president of Web services at Islandia, N.Y.-based Computer Associates, said the company is responding to demand from its customers for a Web services management solution. "The focus is shifting from the development of Web services to the deployment, and once deployed the issue of management is becoming very apparent and we're experiencing a significant pull from our customers," Tcherevik said. Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) manages Web services natively at the service level by monitoring Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages, he said. In addition, Computer Associates is introducing an end-to-end management platform for Web services based on WSDM that includes a scalable Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) server. Moreover, Computer Associates has enlisted several partners to support WSDM, including DataPower Technology Inc., Mindreef Inc., Collaxa Inc., JBoss Group LLC, Systinet Corp. Tcherevik said the company is working with industry leaders such as BEA Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Sun Microsystems Inc. to provide native support for those platforms. For example, DataPower is integrating its XS40 XML security gateway with Computer Associates' Unicenter WSDM to bolster performance, security, reliability and integrity, the companies said. "The combination of DataPower's XML-aware networking devices and CA's Unicenter WSDM represents a key technological advancement and offers mutual customers the management capabilities to cope with the enormous complexity of Web services that are widely distributed across enterprise environments," said Eugene Kuznetsov, chairman and chief technology officer at Cambridge, Mass.-based DataPower..." See the announcement.

  • [October 2003] "Toward Web Services Management Standards. An Architectural Approach to IT System Design." By Heather Kreger (IBM Emerging Technologies) and James Phillips (Actional Corporation). In Web Services Journal (October 2003). ['The work being done in WSDM will lay a firm foundation for effective distributed system management, both leveraging the unifying strengths of Web services in the solution itself and addressing the specific requirements for managing what are rapidly becoming the universal glue in enterprise system design.'] "The OASIS Web Services Distributed Management Technical Committee (WSDM TC) was chartered in March 2003 to recommend standards to address a problem that has been developing for many years. But with the widespread emergence of Web services and service-oriented architecture implementations in mainstream enterprise IT environments, the distributed systems management problem can no longer be ignored. The WSDM TC is focusing on two distinct tasks as it attempts to solve some pressing distributed system management problems. The first activity area, called Management Using Web Services (MUWS) addresses the use of Web services technologies as the foundation of a modern distributed systems management framework - including using Web services to facilitate interactions between managed resources and management applications. The same characteristics that make Web services successful for application integration make them an excellent choice for use in solving the management integration problem - facilitating communications between managers and resources across numerous vendors, platforms, technologies, and topologies. In addition to the use of Web services in the creation of a management framework, WSDM is addressing the specific requirements for managing Web services like any other IT resource. This activity is called Management of Web Services (MOWS). The manageability models that are being developed for Web services will be exposed using the techniques defined as part of the MUWS task..."

  • [October 10, 2003] "IBM, Cisco Push Data Center Standard." By Martin LaMonica. In CNET News.com (October 10, 2003). "IBM and Cisco Systems on Friday announced that they are spearheading an effort to create an industrywide method for troubleshooting glitches in complex-computing data centers. The two companies will pursue the standardization of problem-resolution techniques through submissions to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), a standards body. Their initial proposal for a standard is based on IBM's work on autonomic computing, which envisions computing systems that can automatically fix their own problems without human intervention. IBM and Cisco seek to tackle the lack of a common reporting format for application failures in the disparate parts of a corporate data center, Alan Ganek, vice president of autonomic computing at IBM, said Thursday. The individual elements of a data center -- such as servers, software components and networking gear -- each contain a log that helps systems administrators locate the source of a problem. Typically, the logging information from these elements is tracked separately and not collated or compared. This slows down problem resolution, according to Ganek. To expedite the process, IBM and Cisco are proposing a single data format that would allow disparate systems to share troubleshooting information... [IBM's Common Base Event format], based on IBM's existing 'log and trace' tools, aims to provide a way for hardware and software from multiple companies to share logging information. 'If you expect to add intelligence in order to manage systems, you better understand what the systems are doing. And that means you have to put in the instrumentation to capture what's going on in the system,' Ganek said. IBM expects to finish its own set of network problem resolution tools, including the log and trace software, by the end of the year..." For information on Common Base Event (CBE) format, see References and Additional Information in the IBM/Cisco press release. See also the OASIS WSDM TC, to which the CBE draft specification was submitted for consideration.

  • [September 17, 2003] "Web Services Management Heats Up." By Martin LaMonica. In CNET News.com (September 17, 2003). "The development of a Web services management standard continued to move forward, in a technology area fast becoming the next major competitive race among Web services providers. Computer Associates International, IBM and Web services management start-up Talking Blocks last Thursday submitted a technical specification to the standards group Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) for consideration as an eventual industry standard... The goal of the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) technical committee at OASIS is to write a technical blueprint for products that track the performance of applications written according to Web services standards. The standard, due in January of next year, will ensure that Web services management wares from different companies will interoperate. The WSDM technical committee is slated to meet in two weeks to discuss the standard. ... Weeks before HP announced plans to acquire Talking Blocks, CA quietly purchased Adjoin, another Web services management company. Several other start-ups, including Actional, AmberPoint and Confluent have also introduced Web services management products. Analysts said that investment in the development of Web services management products reflects a growing need among businesses for tools that can spot Web services glitches and ensure that applications run according to predefined performance goals..." See details in the news story: "IBM, Computer Associates, and Talking Blocks Release WS-Manageability Specification." Also: (1) OASIS Web Services Distributed Management TC website; (2) "Talking Blocks, CA, and, IBM Announce Submission of Web Services Manageability Standard to OASIS. Leaders in Systems and Web Services Management Create and Jointly Submit Standard to OASIS Web Services Distributed Management Technical Committee."

  • [September 15, 2003]   IBM, Computer Associates, and Talking Blocks Release WS-Manageability Specification.    A three-part specification for WS-Manageability has been released for public review by IBM, Computer Associates, and Talking Blocks. The specification has been provided as a submission to the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management Technical Committee (WSDM TC) and to the Web service community in general. The Web Services Manageability: Concepts document clarifies the specification scope and "defines the role of the manager in the Web services architecture and provides practical information on manageability implementation patterns and discovery considerations." The WS-Manageability Specification document introduces the "general concepts of a manageability model in terms of manageability topics, (identification, configuration, state, metrics, and relationships) and the aspects (properties, operations and events) used to define them. These abstract concepts apply to understanding and describing the manageability information and behavior of any IT resource, not just Web services. The authors use these concepts to organize an approach to Web services manageability. The manageability model for Web services endpoint is defined as concrete models in UML using the topics and aspects concepts, without implying any particular implementation or locus of implementation." The WS-Manageability Representation document supplies the interface definitions "based on the model as WSDL 1.1 and GWSDL renderings. These definitions are meant to show how the topics and aspects concepts along with concrete models can influence the development of consistent Web services interfaces for accessing the manageability information of Web services. The interfaces illustrate how the manageability model for Web services can be divided into aspects of topics that apply to all manageable resources and aspects of topics that apply only to the manageability of Web service endpoints."

  • [September 02, 2003] "XML Exposes Rich Network Data. Network, Systems Management Vendors Tackle Web Services Limitations." By Scott Tyler Shafer. In InfoWorld (September 01, 2003). "Until recently, the enterprise was primarily concerned about Web services development and deployment scenarios. Now, networking and systems management vendors are paving the way for companies to discover and manage Web Services at run time. Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM are among the vendors looking to speed the adoption of Web services architectures by building additional capabilities into existing systems management platforms. Meanwhile, at the network layer, F5 and Datapower Technology are altering network management platforms to gather richer information on the health and performance of various network elements via new XML and SOAP interfaces. The moves suggest vendors are addressing gaps in Web services management at deeper infrastructure layers. Accelerating the effort is an emerging standard called WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management), pronounced 'wisdom'. Proposed to the OASIS standards body in July, WSDM is a model for managing a Web Services-oriented architecture. Born of HP's work on the Web Services Management Framework, the WSDM specification is expected to be complete by January 2004. It will define a standard way to use and manage Web services. Enterprise customers will benefit from the ability to define and manage the performance and availability attributes of Web services architectures, according to Hewlett-Packard... CA, IBM, and HP are all racing to release management modules that will help enterprises manage existing and future Web Services. Hewlett-Packard is working on HP OpenView Web Service Management Engine, which was developed in March and is the foundation for the proposed WSDM standard. Due out in late fall, the management engine is described by Smith as a collection of tools that manage Web services environments. Specifically, the tool allows an enterprise to provision a Web services-based application and create SLAs on performance and availability. It also determines the authentication and authorization requirements for subscribing to the new application. The engine itself will intercept packets and route them to the appropriate requested Web service. CA for its part is working on Unicenter WSDM. Currently in beta with customers, the platform also focuses on performance and availability of Web services. 'What we're focused on building with WSDM is a standard set of metrics regarding health and availability of Web services applications,' Hochhauser said. 'With WSDM, a business partner can understand what is happening on both their side of the application and the business partner's side.' IBM is adding WSDM support functions to its Tivoli products. According to David Cox, an architect at Tivoli Systems, Tivoli has created an events and monitoring application that measures system and transaction performance. It will be ready at the end of the year..."

  • [August 20, 2003] "Canonical Situation Data Format: The Common Base Event." By IBM Staff Members: David Ogle (Autonomic Computing), Heather Kreger (Emerging Technologies), Abdi Salahshour (Autonomic Computing), Jason Cornpropst (Tivoli Event Management), Eric Labadie (WSAD PD Tooling), Mandy Chessell (Business Integration), Bill Horn (IBM Research - Yorktown), and John Gerken (Emerging Technologies). Reference: ACAB.BO0301.1.1. Copyright (c) International Business Machines Corporation. 66 pages. With XML Schema. IBM submission to the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management TC. "This document defines a common base event (CBE) and supporting technologies that define the structure of an event in a consistent and a common format. The purpose of the CBE is to facilitate effective intercommunication among disparate enterprise components that support logging, management, problem determination, autonomic computing and e-business functions in an enterprise. This document specifies baseline that encapsulate properties common to a wide variety of events, including business, autonomic, management, tracing and logging type events. The event format of the event is expressed as an XML document using UTF-8 or 16 encoding. This document is prescriptive about the format and content of the data that is passed or retrieved from component. However, it is not prescriptive about the ways in which how individual applications are to store their data locally. Therefore, the application requirement is only to be able to generate or render events in this format, not necessarily to store them in this format. The goal of this effort is to ensure the accuracy, improve the detail and standardize the format of events to assist in designing robust, manageable and deterministic systems. The results are a collection of specifications surrounding a 'Common Base Event' definition that serves as a new standard for events among enterprise management and business applications... The goal of this work is to provide more than just an element definition for a common event. In addition, an XML schema definition is provided. This document's scope is limited to data format and content of the data; how the data is sent and received and how an application processes the data is outside the scope of this document... When a situation occurs, a 3-tuple must be reported: (1) the identification of the component that is reporting the situation, (2) the identification of the component that is experiencing the situation (which might be the same as the component that is reporting the situation), and (3) the situation itself... The sourceComponentId is the identification of the component that was affected or was impacted by the event or situation. The data type for this property is a complex type as described by the ComponentIdentification type that provides the required data to uniquely identify a component... The reporterComponentId is the identification of the component that reported the event or situation on behalf of the affected component. The data type for this property is a complex type as described by the ComponentIdentification type that provides the required data to uniquely identifying a component... The situationInformation is the data that describes the situation reported by the event. The situation information includes a required set of properties or attributes that are common across products groups and platforms, yet architected and flexible enough to allow for adoption to product-specific requirements..." See also the note from Thomas Studwell posted 2003-08-20 to the OASIS WSDM TC list ['IBM Submits Common Base Events Specification to WS-DM TC']: IBM is pleased to announce the submission of the 'Canonical Situation Format: Common Base Event Specification' (CBE) to the Web Services Distributed Management Technical Committee (WS-DM) of OASIS. This submission has been developed in collaboration with a number of industry leaders and is being supported in this submission by Computer Associates International, and Talking Blocks, Inc., both key members of the WS-DM TC. This submission will be moved for acceptance by the WS-DM TC for consideration in the WS-DM TC standards on Thursday, August 21, 2003. The general principles behind the CBE specification were presented to the WS-DM TC on July 28 [2003] during the WS-DM TC face to face meeting..." [source .DOC]

  • [July 30, 2003] "IBM, CA Square Up to HP on Management." By Keith Rodgers. From LooselyCoupled.com (July 30, 2003). "IBM and Computer Associates teamed up at a key web services standards meeting yesterday [2003-07-29] in a surprise rebuff to a submission by Hewlett-Packard. At stake is the future development path of IT management software. Although the initial purpose of the rival proposals is merely to establish standards that govern web services manageability, the ultimate aim is to roll out the same standards as a foundation for the entire IT management spectrum -- not just management of web services, but management of other IT assets through web services. The established systems management giants are also hoping that, by shifting the emphasis back to the wider management framework, they can recapture the market advantage they've currently ceded in web services management to smaller specialist vendors. HP had grabbed headlines on July 21 [2003], when it formally announced it would submit its Web Services Management Framework to the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) committee of e-business standards body OASIS. The HP submission had the backing of eight other developers on the committee, including Sun, Oracle, BEA, Iona, Tibco and webMethods... rivals IBM and CA [have] joined forces with web services management specialist Talking Blocks to present their own vision, dubbed WS-Manageability, to the OASIS meeting... The WS-Manageability proposal stems from work that IBM, Computer Associates and Talking Blocks have done for another standards group, the W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group. A primary concern is to make full use of other emerging 'WS-*' web services standards, such as WS-Policy, that form part of the generic web services platform. Any proposed management standard should not stray from its core management mission, they warn, either into defining elements of the generic infrastructure, or into specifying aspects of management applications... The irony of this particular standards battle is that none of the big three systems management vendors -- IBM, HP and CA -- can claim to be leading the field in web services management. It is specialists such as Actional, Amberpoint, Talking Blocks and Infravio who have been making all the running in terms of delivering production software into user deployments, with each of them able to point to several reference customers. [However,] by emphasizing management through web services, the established systems management giants can gain recognition in the web services arena while broadening the issue out to play to their own strengths..." See also: (1) the presentations "Web Services Manageability" and "Management and Web Service Management," referenced in the following bibliographic entry; (2) the HP framework proposal, "HP Contributes Web Services Management Framework Specification to OASIS TC."

  • [July 29, 2003] "Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) TC Submission: Web Services Manageability." By Heather Kreger (IBM), Igor Sedukhin (Computer Associates), and Mark Potts (Talking Blocks). PDF from source .PPT. July 24, 2003. 10 pages. Posted to the OASIS WSDM TC list by Ellen Stokes (IBM). Prose adapted from the slides: "#2: As to background, the design started with active involvement of the authors on W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group Management Task Force. To avoid fragmentation of Management Standards the team co-authored a specification to facilitate development of consensus among management vendors. They considered concepts from existing work on Web services as a management platform. The specification is the agreed minimum sufficient set of information that make Web service endpoints manageable. #3: As to main considerations, the design does not imply the implementation of the manageability or the manager. It captures manageability with XML and WSDL and is consistent with existing standards based Web Service infrastructures. It is consistent with existing management models and standards, uses existing infrastructure mechanisms, has an easily extensible model, is easily implementable, reducing impact on Web service development. #4: As to the intention of the submission, the specification will define the model for the manageability of Web services and define access to this manageability. The access and model can be rendered in (a) WSDL 1.1; (b) GWSDL; (c) CIM Models; (4) WSDL 1.2. The specification identifies requirements for more general Web services standards, but does not define them. The team is submitting the Common Base Event specification (XML event format for management events)... #8: As to an extensible manageability, the topics are extensible (new topics can be created; any topic can have aspects added to them [i.e., define new properties, operations, and events]; and new aspects can be created. Manageability information is extensible. #9: As to infrastructure, the specification supports building WS-I basic profile compliant manageable Web services; it leverages non-management specific infrastructure available to us from: (a) WS* e.g., WS-addressing, WS-policy; (b) OGSI e.g., serviceData, notifications; (c) CMM e.g., lifecycle, relationships, metadata. It does not imply a specific management framework. The authorship team intends to submit this work to the OASIS WSDM TC..." See also the presentation "Management and Web Service Management" as posted 2003-07-29; this presentation "offers work to OASIS completed by IBM with contribution from CA and Talking Blocks... It details a frame of reference for Management Applications, Managers, Manageability using Web services and Manageability of Web services. The work also identifies the management concerns pertinent to each and the dependencies in terms of common description that are required..." [source .PPT, cache]

  • [July 21, 2003]   HP Contributes Web Services Management Framework Specification to OASIS TC.    With support from Ascential Software, BEA Systems, Informatica, IONA, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, TIBCO Software, and webMethods, HP has announced the publication of a Web Services Management Framework Version 2.0 and plans to contribute the specification set to the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management TC. As published, WSMF contains three loosely coupled specifications that provide the necessary components of a management stack: WSMF-Foundation defines the base framework for management using Web services; WS-Events defines the Web services based event notification mechanism and is used by WSMF-Foundation; WSMF-Web Services Management defines the model for management of Web services. The distribution is available for download, and includes an Overview, three prose specifications in PDF, three XML schemas, and five WSDLs. WSMF "is a logical architecture for the management of resources, including Web services themselves, through Web services. This framework is based on the notion of managed objects and their relationships. A managed object essentially represents a resource and exposes a set of management interfaces through which the underlying resource could be managed. Similarly, relationships among managed objects represent relationships among underlying resources. The framework defines how all IT resources in an adaptive enterprise can expose management information about themselves and how they can be managed. A management interface communicates immediate knowledge about changes in business processes and IT infrastructure whenever application and infrastructure events occur, and it gives companies the choice and flexibility to adopt future innovations and advance the management of their adaptive enterprise."

  • [July 15, 2003] "Computer Associates Tackles Web Services Management. Tool Released for Discovery, Monitoring." By Brian Fonseca. In InfoWorld (July 14, 2003). "In an effort to overcome complexities associated with Web services management, Computer Associates on Monday introduced Unicenter Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) 1.0, a tool designed to automatically discover and monitor Web services... For the monitoring of Web services within .Net environments and support of ASP .Net, CA introduced Unicenter Management for .Net Framework 3.0. The tool offers service-level reporting, health and performance reporting, and capacity utilization, said Dmitri Tcherevik, vice president and director of Web services at Islandia, N.Y.-based CA. Meanwhile, Unicenter Management for WebSphere Release 3.5 and Unicenter Management for WebLogic 3.5 work within J2EE to discover deployed Web services and their interfaces. Tcherevik said WSDM can analyze information about services, servers, and applications surrounding Web services to enable customers to either take corrective action or allow Unicenter's automated 'self-healing' capability to resolve the problem without human intervention. Supporting both the J2EE and .Net environments, WSDM offers services controls that allow users to disable, enable, or redirect Web services. The product monitors service characteristics of Web services transactions. In effect, one can use WSDM to automatically set alert thresholds and offer centralized management... CA announced the release of eTrust Directory 4.1. The product offers a UDDI implementation to support Web services, featuring the ability to store, replicate, and distribute vast amounts of Web services data." See details in the announcement: "CA Ensures Performance, Reliability and Security of Web Services With New Unicenter and eTrust Solutions. Five Advanced Management and Security Offerings Enable IT Organizations To Optimize Service Levels for Enterprise and Customer-Facing Systems."

  • [July 15, 2003] "CA Unveils Web Services Management Technology." By Steven Burke and Heather Clancy. In InternetWeek (July 15, 2003). "Computer Associates International has announced several new products for facilitating Web services, including Unicenter WSDM, a new management product designed to monitor and track Web services. The product, currently in beta, allows solution providers to quickly respond to lowered services levels or interruptions across servers and storage networks. 'I don't have to have access to someone else's infrastructure to monitor the services, yet I can manage it,' said Dmitri Tcherevik, vice president and director of Web services at CA. CA CTO Yogesh Gupta demonstrated Unicenter WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management) during his CA World keynote Tuesday in Las Vegas. CA Chairman and CEO Sanjay Kumar said CA will not actively recruit partners for Unicenter WSDM, but existing Unicenter channel partners will have the ability to sell and support the product. Tcherevik said Unicenter WSDM is expected to be generally available by the end of the calendar year. The vendor will use the beta program to establish pricing strategy but likely will use a tiered approach based on CA's current FlexSelect program, he said. The software can be deployed in a stand-alone fashion, although additional features are available to those that use it with the Unicenter management console..." See the announcement: "CA Ensures Performance, Reliability and Security of Web Services With New Unicenter and eTrust Solutions. Five Advanced Management and Security Offerings Enable IT Organizations To Optimize Service Levels for Enterprise and Customer-Facing Systems."

  • [March 18, 2003] "OASIS Eyes Open Web Services Management Specs." By Vance McCarthy. In Enterprise Developer News (March 10, 2003). "OASIS has created a Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) technical committee to explore technical solutions to managing end-to-end web services. The new committee arises in part out of work begun last fall by the OASIS Management Protocol Technical Committee, which was set up to define a new inter-enterprise protocol for web services... 'As the number of web services deployed across the extended enterprise increases, the ability to effectively manage those services will become critical to building out a comprehensive services-oriented architecture,' said Winston Bumpus (of Novell) and co-chair of the WSDM Technical Committee in a statement... Initial WSDM members include Actional, BMC Software, Computer Associates, Confluent Software, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Novell, OpenNetwork, SeeBeyond, Sun Microsystems, Waveset and webMethods. For its part, HP plans to contribute to OASIS what CEO Carly Fiorina calls a 'web services management framework' that will provide Java and .NET developers and sysadmins a way to model and design relationships between web services and let companies architect management-ready services that can plug into management tools based on open standards... At the outset of OASIS' work to develop better standards for web services management, IDN interviewed Bumpus about the specific needs of web services management. Bumpus enumerated the top priorities for a new management protocol management protocol (yet to be named): event notification, exception handling, asynchronous communications, service level agreement (SLA) enforcement and state management for traffic between legacy and Internet resources. 'Whatever we do, management needs to encode policy and SLAs,' Bumpus said. Another key item for cross-platform management is what Bumpus calls 'model independence.' He puts it this way: 'If we went down the road and said, 'Let's pick a model', and some vendors came back and said they couldn't support that model, then our interoperability is at risk. SOAP is an RPC mechanism, but it also creates a common model for data encoding, so you can have a level of interoperability you couldn't have before. Also, the new protocol will have to deal with domains that are virtual and dynamic -- not physical.' The protocol will store and exchange management data using XML... We asked Bumpus why, given the fact that most of management protocol is based on information capture and transfer, could XML just be used on top of existing management protocols. 'XML didn't solve the problem of information exchange all by itself,' he said, 'but we will be using XML schema in addition to techniques that enable us to define and validate the information being captured and sent.' The protocol must also support representations of management information (devices and properties) between multiple models, and that required something broader than simply XML, Bumpus said, such as technology based on the DMTF's Common Information Model..." See details in "OASIS Technical Committee Addresses Management of Web Services."

  • [March 11, 2003] "OASIS Expands Scope of Web Services Management Work." By John Fontana. In Network World (March 11, 2003). "A standards body working on management specifications for Web services admitted on Monday that its original work did not go far enough, so it is regrouping and redefining its goals. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) is mothballing its Management Protocol Technical Committee, which began last summer to devise a protocol for managing Web services, and has formed the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) Technical Committee. The new committee will not only continue to develop a specification that describes how to implement management using Web services, but will add to that work by defining how to manage Web services themselves. The OASIS group will incorporate management work being done in the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Services Architecture Working Group, the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), and the Global Grid Forum. 'If we don't define management clearly and quickly, we'll have a piecemeal, proprietary implementation of management for Web services,' says Winston Bumpus, co-chair of the WSDM technical committee and director of standards for Novell. 'In a large, distributed environment, if each service is managed differently [the environment] will be difficult to deploy. It became clear to us in the original charter of the management protocol group that we needed to do more.' Management and security are two high-profile issues inhibiting the nirvana of Web services, which promise to integrate systems across corporate boundaries. Today, many network executives are waiting for those standards to be created and mature before considering the use of Web services outside of their networks or pilot programs. OASIS also is working on security specification for Web services, and that work will dovetail with the management efforts, says Bumpus. The new technical committee will define a specification and management model based on the Common Information Model from the Distributed Management Task Force, says Bumpus..." References in "OASIS Technical Committee Addresses Management of Web Services."

  • [March 10, 2003] "OASIS Looks at Web Services Management. Technical Committee Joins With W3C, DMTF, sans Microsoft." By Paul Krill. In InfoWorld (March 10, 2003). "The newly formed OASIS Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) Technical committee plans to work with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) as well as with other OASIS security and Web services concerns. OASIS will align its work with similar efforts at the other organizations. 'I think this is significant in that this new technical committee is going to focus on Web services, not only management using Web services but the management of Web services [themselves],' said Winston Bumpus, chairman of the committee and director of standards at Novell. The committee plans to base its work on the DMTF CIM (Common Information Model) and expand that model to include Web services, Bumpus said. The OASIS WSDM 1.0 specification is targeted for completion in January 2004. The new OASIS committee replaces the OASIS Management Protocol Technical Committee, which did not cover management of Web services. Among the participants in the WSDM committee are BMC Software, Computer Associates, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi , IBM, Novell, Sun Microsystems, and webMethods..." See other references in "OASIS Technical Committee Addresses Management of Web Services."

  • [March 10, 2003] "Standards Group Tackles Web Services." By Martin LaMonica. In CNET News.com (March 10, 2003). "Hoping to accelerate the use of Web services, a standards group on Monday said it will create a technical committee to tackle the problem of managing Web services applications. The Web Services Distributed Management Technical Committee at the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, or OASIS, will define methods to monitor the performance and security of Web services, the organization said. Web services is an umbrella term for a set of standards and techniques to build applications that can easily communicate... The committee will work with ongoing technical developments at other standards bodies, including the World Wide Web Consortium and the Distributed Management Task Force. Networking company Novell and IBM are co-chairs of the Web Services Distributed Management Technical Committee at OASIS. 'Just as security is a prime concern for our customers looking to deploy Web services, so too is the need to effectively manage those distributed Web services across their organizations,' Winston Bumpus, director of standards for Novell, said in a statement... The latest standardization efforts have focused on capabilities needed for more widespread Web services usage. OASIS said it has formed committees to shepherd the completion of standards around security, reliable messaging and structured business documents..." See details in "OASIS Technical Committee Addresses Management of Web Services."

  • [March 03, 2003] "HP Zeros In on Web Services Management." By Darryl K. Taft. In eWEEK (March 03, 2003). "Hewlett-Packard Corp. announced several initiatives around Web services management Monday, including the formation of a dedicated Web services management team within the company, a focus on Web services management in the Java environment, expansion of HP OpenView into Web services management, and a leading role in setting standards for Web services management. HP's chairman and chief executive, Carly Fiorina, made the announcements Monday during a keynote speech at BEA Systems Inc.'s eWorld developer conference in Orlando, Fla. Fiorina said management concerns remain one of the key inhibitors to widespread adoption of Web services. Said Al Smith, CTO of the newly announced Web Services management organization at HP: 'We've made a laser-like focus on the direction we're taking with software, and we're going to use OpenView as the cornerstone of HP's Web services management initiative... Smith said HP will be working with a number of other companies, including IBM Corp., Novell Inc. and webMethods Inc., to form a new technical committee in the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). The new committee, which will be announced later this week, will be known as the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) committee and will seek to create a standard for Web services management, Smith said. The WSDM committee is a reorganization of the Web Services management Task Force, another OASIS group. WSDM will re-emphasize the work the task force started and will work in close alignment with the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Services Architecture efforts and the Global Grid Forum's work on management in the Web services space, Smith said. Smith said HP will contribute a Web services management framework to the OASIS group. He said the framework proposes two-way communication in Web services management and is designed to enable developers to create "management-ready" systems for integration with existing standards-based management tools... And as part of its own product offerings, HP has developed a suite of software components, the HP OpenView Web Services Management Engine, which enables users to intercept Web services requests and manage the service as opposed to the platform where it resides, Smith said. And specific to BEA, HP offers the HP OpenView Transaction Analyzer, which uses APIs, co-developed with BEA, to monitor application transactions. In addition, HP has an HP OpenView Smart Plug-in for monitoring and managing BEA WebLogic Servers..." Related references: (1) "Fiorina: HP Makes Strategic Investments in Web Services Management. Company Unveils Software, Services, Standards Framework to Help Customers Adopt Web Services, Bridge Competing J2EE and .NET Worlds."; (2) "OASIS Technical Committee Addresses Management of Web Services."

  • [October 02, 2002] "OASIS Explores Protocol To Manage B2B Web Services." By Vance McCarthy. From OpenEnterpriseTrends.com [The Open Source Portal for Enterprise Developers] October 2002. "OASIS has taken on another massive project that could further define the role -- and the architecture -- of web services, this time in the B2B arena. A new committee, called the OASIS Management Protocol Technical Committee, has set itself the task of defining a new inter-enterprise protocol that would enable developers and sysadmins to build, monitor and manage web services interactions between companies. The scope of the project makes this protocol one of the most complicated ever, as committee members intend to empower the protocol to provide views and management controls to the entire life-cycle of a web services transaction or event. Topologically, this means the new protocol will need to provide views into network, application logic and even business logic elements of traffic. Committee members also intend to ensure the protocol supports more than one application model because the protocol is intended to support inter-enterprise (B2B) communications. The committee membership, to date, comprises many of the leaders in network management, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Novell, Computer Associates, Microsoft, Intel and Cisco, among others. The committee has targeted early 2003 for their first draft specification of the new B2B web services management protocol. As the work begins, Open Enterprise Trends caught up with chair of the committee, Winston Bumpus, (who is also the President of the Distributed Management Task Force and an employee of Novell). OET asked him about the scope of the project, its goals and when the front-lines IT community might see some impact..."

  • [August 01, 2002] "Standards-Based Web Services Management." By Winston Bumpus (President, DMTF; Director of Standards, Novell, Inc). July 22, 2002. Presented at The Open Group Conference 'Boundaryless Information Flow: The Role of Web Services.' 11 pages. "DMTF Technologies include: Desktop Management Interface (DMI); Common Information Model (CIM); Directory Enabled Network (DEN); Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM); System Management BIOS (SMBIOS); Alert Standard Format (ASF)... WBEM is being updated to address/include emerging standards such as SOAP. DMTF is collaborating with OASIS to sponsor a new management protocol technical committee -- to develop open industry standard management protocols to provide a Web-based mechanism to monitor and control managed elements in a distributed environment... WBEM offers a standards-based approach to promote broad implementation and compliance. Compliance is a critical phase in the maturation and validation of standards..."

  • [September 10, 2002] "OASIS to Aid Web Services Management." By Darryl K. Taft. In eWEEK (September 10, 2002). "The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, or OASIS, standards consortium Tuesday announced the formation of a technical committee to facilitate distributed systems management over the Internet. Called the OASIS Management Protocol Technical Committee, the new group will seek ways to help businesses manage their own Web services and oversee their interaction with services offered by other companies, OASIS said. The OASIS Management Protocol will be designed to manage desktops, services and networks across an enterprise or across the Internet. OASIS officials said the organization is looking at several Web services standards and operations for potential use in the Management Protocol, including XML, the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Open Model Interface (OMI) and the Distributed Management Task Force's Common Information Model (CIM). 'The widespread need for the integration of systems and network management tools is causing the industry to take a more holistic approach to the management of networks--and Web services provide the ideal vehicle for making that happen,' Winston Bumpus, director of open technologies and standards at Novell Inc. and chair of the OASIS Management Protocol Technical Committee, said in a statement. 'Our work at OASIS will help level the playing field and allow companies to manage systems regardless of the platform they use.' The Management Protocol joins several Web services standards currently being developed within OASIS, officials of the organization said. Other specifications include Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) for discovery, Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language (ebXML) for electronic business commerce, WS-Security for secure Web services, Web Services of Interactive Applications (WSIA) for interactive Web applications, Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP) for remote portals and others, OASIS officials said. Meanwhile, database vendor Sybase Inc. announced it has received ebXML Messaging Interoperability Certification for its Sybase Web Services Integrator technology..."

  • Open Management Interface Specification. Version 1.0. Revision 1 OASIS. From webMethods (Geoff Bullen, Ash Nangia, Doug Stein, Mona He, Prasad Yendluri, Steve Jankowski) and Hewlett-Packard (Art Harkin, Victor Martin, Homayoun Pourheidari, Fu-Tai Shih). 118 pages. Submitted [via Veena Subrahmanyam, HP] 2002-08-20 to the OASIS Management Protocol Technical Committee. "The Open Management Interface (OMI) is an open specification, jointly authored by Hewlett Packard and webMethods, to provide an easy, open way for system management vendors and other interested parties to access and manage the resources associated with an integration platform and its associated business processes... The intent of OMI is to provide an easy, open way for systems management vendors and other interested parties to access and manage the resources associated with an integration platform and its associated business processes. What has been developed is a generic and extendable interface, accessed as a web service (i.e., via SOAP, XML and HTTP). Through this interface consumers can manipulate a set of OMI managed objects that represent the available resources. The OMI specification also defines a set of standard attributes, operations and notifications for each type of OMI managed resource and also a set of relations that can exist between OMI managed objects..." See other background in: (1) "webMethods and HP Release Open Management Interface Specification (OMI) Version 1.0."; (2) "webMethods and HP Announce Availability of the Open Management Interface (OMI) Specification Version 1.0. Companies Answer Customer Demand for Management of Integration Platforms, Business Processes and Web Services."

  • [August 16, 2002] "Web Services Management Protocol Spec Eyed." By Paul Krill. In InfoWorld (August 15, 2002). "OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) has formed a technical committee to propose an XML-based management protocol specification for Web services, said a Novell official Thursday who is chairing the committee. The OASIS Management Protocol Technical Committee, formed about two weeks ago, is intended to boost distributed systems management over the Internet, according to Novell. Management of Web services through use of Web services is the crux of the effort, said Novell's Winston Bumpus, director of standards for the company, in San Jose, Calif., and chairman of the new OASIS committee. As the industry is building a Web services platform, it is important that there be an infrastructure to manage it, Bumpus said. The protocol would be used for functions such as resource allocation, monitoring, controlling, and troubleshooting, Bumpus said. The committee is reviewing a number of technologies for use in the protocol, including as XML, SOAP, OMI (Open Model Interface), DMTF CIM (Distributed Management Task Force Common Information Model), and DMTF CIM Operations. Plans are to have the specification ready in June 2003, with reference implementations to appear next spring and supportive products to be available in late-2003, Bumpus said. The effort is intended to enable companies to not only manage their own services but to also oversee interaction of those services with services from other companies, according to Novell. The work is intended to deliver an industry-standard protocol for managing desktops, services, and networks across an enterprise or Internet environment..."

  • [July 17, 2002] "Towards XML Based Management and Configuration." By Ted Goddard (Wind River Systems). IETF Internet-Draft. Reference: 'draft-goddard-xmlconf-survey-00.txt'. June 2002, expires: December 2002. 16 pages. "This informational document surveys a variety of existing technologies relevant to the exploration of an XML-based technology for network management and configuration. The technologies surveyed include SOAP, WSDL, SyncML, WBEM, RDF, CC/PP, and JUNOScript. The data representation capability of XML with and without schemas and DTDs is compared with SMIv2... Technologies for management and configuration cover a broad spectrum, from abstract information models, to model representation languages, to encodings, to protocols. XML itself focuses on structured data encoding, but specifications such as SOAP or WSDL use XML to represent data and to describe the communication semantics. Some specifications, such as SyncML and WBEM include explicit communication bindings, such as to OBEX or HTTP... Several of the specifications (SOAP, RDF, SyncML) use URLs or URIs to specify the target of an operation. Thus, a basic issue for an XML based management system may be a scheme for identifying network elements and their components by URIs... When combined with schemas, XML can be used to encode and validate data of arbitrary complexity in a way that is verbose but faithful to application design. XML encoded data can be easily compressed, transformed, or embedded into container formats by a wide variety of emerging tools. A standardized XML encoding for network management and configuration could be used for both persistent storage and interactive management, and could be transported over higher level protocols such as SOAP or SyncML, or directly over lower level protocols like HTTP..." [cache]

  • [June 2002] "Concepts and Requirements for XML Network Configuration." By Margaret Wasserman (Wind River). IETF Internet-Draft. Reference: 'draft-wasserman-xmlconf-req-00.txt'. June 2002, expires December 2002. "This document defines basic concepts and describes the requirements for a standard network configuration protocol, which could be used to manage the configuration of networks and networking equipment. The document also discusses a phased approach to developing an XML-based configuration protocol that could provide tangible benefits in the short term, while working towards an XML-based configuration protocol that meets the full requirements... [1] Phase One (XML over Secure Transport): The first standardization task of a working group focused on XML configuration should be to standardize how XML data can be transmitted over a secure protocol transport. This would include an explanation of how XML should be encapsulated within the secure transport, and the assignment of a new port number for XML transport connections... This phase would basically define the protocol transport for later XML configuration work. [2] Phase Two (XML Operations on Configuration Blocks): For the second phase, an XML configuration WG should focus on defining how operations on blocks of configuration information, representing whole or partial system configurations, could be transferred over the secure transport defined in the first phase. This would include a basic RPC-like mechanism for specifying operations on configuration blocks. [3] Phase Three (XML Operations on Data Objects): In phase three, it would become necessary to define a data model, data modeling language and complete data representation for the XML configuration protocol. In this phase, we would define operations to manipulate individual configuration data objects. [4] Phase Four (Multi-System Transactions using XML): Phase four would involve the addition of multi-system transaction support to the XML configuration protocol. After the completion of phase four, it would be possible to use the XML configuration protocol to configure entire networks, not just individual pieces of networking equipment..." [cache]
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