Update 2005-03-09: OASIS administration announced that the balloted specification was approved as an OASIS Standard. See the press release: "Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) Approved as OASIS Standard. Actional, BEA Systems, BMC Software, Computer Associates, Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Novell, Tibco, and Others Define Web Services Architecture to Manage Distributed Resources."

[February 23, 2005] 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 has 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.

An Apache Software Foundation (ASP) Incubator Muse Project has produced the Muse v0.5 Alpha product for testing. Muse is "a robust Java implementation of the OASIS MUWS specification and the underlying WS-* specifications it is based upon. The Muse framework enables developers to build MUWS compliant Web services that are hosted by the Axis SOAP Engine; a future implementation will use Apache Apollo Project as its WS-ResourceFramework implementation and Apache Hermes Project as its Web Services Notification implementation."

Bibliographic Information

• Web Services Distributed Management: Management of Web Services (WSDM-MOWS) 1.0. Edited by Igor Sedukhin (Computer Associates). OASIS WSDM TC, Committee Draft. December 10, 2004. Document identifier: 'cd-wsdm-mows-1.0'. 50 pages.

• Web Services Distributed Management: Management Using Web Services (MUWS 1.0) Part 1. Edited by William Vambenepe (Hewlett-Packard). OASIS WSDM TC, Committee Draft. January 11, 2005. Submitted for ballot as an OASIS Standard. Document identifier: 'cd-wsdm-muws-part1-1.0'. 30 pages.

• Web Services Distributed Management: Management Using Web Services (MUWS 1.0) Part 2. Edited by William Vambenepe (Hewlett-Packard). OASIS WSDM TC, Committee Draft. December 9, 2004. Document identifier: 'cd-wsdm-muws-part2-1.0'. 53 pages.

Web Services Distributed Management Overview

The following descriptive text has been provided by Heather Kreger (IBM; OASIS Web Services Distributed Management TC Co-Chair):

The industry has been wrestling with the complexity of managing their 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 co-exist to be able to manage the breadth of resources. This creates a classic integration problem, the management integration problem.

OASIS [is now 2005-02-23 voting to approve] a new standard from the Web Services Distributed Management TC as the first step to solving the management integration problem: Web Services Distributed Management: Management Using Web Services (MUWS) and Web Services Distributed Management: Management Of Web Services (MOWS) specifications.

Web Services Distributed Management: Management Using Web Services (MUWS) 1.0 defines how to represent and access the manageability interfaces of resources as Web services. This standard manageable resource definition creates an integration layer between managers and the different management protocols used to instrument resources. It is the foundation of enabling management applications to be built using Web services and allows resources to be managed by many managers with one set of instrumentation.

The WSDM MUWS specification provides interoperable, base manageability for monitoring and control managers using Web services. It defines a basic set of manageability capabilities, like resource identity, metrics, configuration, and relationships, which can be composed to express the capability of the management instrumentation. WSDM MUWS also defines a standard management event format to improve interoperability and correlation. WSDM MUWS 1.0 has been defined in two specifications, MUWS Part 1, which defines the base architectural concepts and required components, and MUWS Part 2 which defines standard composeable support for manageability capabilities.

Web Services Distributed Management: Management Of Web Services (MOWS) 1.0 specification defines the how to manage Web services as resources and how to describe and access that manageability using MUWS. It provides mechanisms and methodologies that enable manageable Web services applications to interoperate across enterprise and organizational boundaries. The MOWS specification allows integration of management with Web services-based business applications and processes.

The WSDM specifications depend on the WS-I basic profile plus other Web services foundation specifications being standardized in OASIS: WS-Resource Framework for properties and WS-Notification for management event transport. WSDM will evolve as the Web services platform, and the specifications WSDM depends on, evolve and become standards.

About Apache Software Foundation Incubator Muse Project

On February 10, 2005 the Apache WebServices Muse Development Team announced the availability of Muse v0.5 ALPHA. Muse is "a robust Java implementation of the Management using Web Services (MuWS) 0.5 specification and the underlying WS-* specifications it is based upon. The next major release of Muse, targeted for March 2005, will be an implementation of the soon-to-be-released MuWS 1.0 [final approved OASIS] specification. The current [alpha] release provides a way to take a MUWS-specific WSDL file and generate a MUWS-compliant webservice which can be hosted inside of Apache Axis. This release contains the original implementation provided by HP and is a self-contained implementation of the specs. The future Muse 1.0 implementation will use Apache Apollo Project as its WS-ResourceFramework implementation and Apache Hermes Project as its Web Services Notification implementation..."

According the the Muse Architecture document, "The Muse framework enables developers to build MUWS compliant Web services that are then hosted by the Axis SOAP Engine. A 'Target Service' represents the MUWS compliant Web service. Muse provides Axis SOAP Engine components and Java class hierarchies to enable the developer to focus on developing the business logic for the Target Service. In other words, the developer is responsible for connecting the management capability defined in the service's WSDL to the actual managed resource, while Muse provides SOAP message routing and default behavior in accordance with the MUWS specification..."