Configuration management in enterprise wide systems management

Abstract

Almost all aspects of systems management deal with configuration elements as the subject matter. Since configuration information thus serves a unifying role, it was decided to investigate how to integrate systems management around configuration management. From the end user perspective this can be accomplished by presenting each aspect of systems management in terms of an associated configuration diagram, and having each configuration element (disk, workstation, etc.) represented in such a way as to indicate the functioning of that particular element with regard to the aspect of interest (e.g., by colors, labels or associated graphics). The integration of the systems management applications is based on an interconnected data model. We outline the design for this approach and describe a configuration management prototype that addresses critical issues of this design. The prototype manages a configuration of servers (NFS) in a distributed UNIX environment.