WSDM spurs management integration

Web Services Distributed Management: Management Using Web Services 1.0 allows management software from different vendors to interoperate more easily, enabling end-to-end and even cross-enterprise management.

Corporations today struggle to manage complex business systems built on a variety of IT and application resources from a diverse set of vendors. These business systems should have flexibility to accommodate mergers, acquisitions, supply-chain changes and compliance with regulations.

A standard from the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) serves as the foundation for management integration. Completed in March, Web Services Distributed Management: Management Using Web Services 1.0 (WSDM ) defines how to represent and invoke the manageability of an IT resource as a Web service. WSDM allows management software from different vendors to interoperate more easily, enabling end-to-end and even cross-enterprise management.

WSDM is based on a set of key architectural principles: composability, model agnosticism, agent-architecture agnosticism and inspection. Model agnosticism allows WSDM to represent any resource model using Web services . Composability means that resources must support only the minimum functions needed, allowing implementations for small, constrained resources or sophisticated servers. During application and resource development and dynamic discovery of WSDM resources at run-time, development tools will use inspection of XML documents. Agent-architecture agnosticism allows WSDM to adapt current resources, and not force reinstrumentation.

The management standard provides four key technologies: Web services platform profile, manageability capabilities, relationships and the WSDM event format.

The Web services platform profile explains how other OASIS standards are used as ‘Net platforms, ensuring that standard Web services skills, tools and run-times can be used for management. It precludes the need for maintaining a management-specific Web services platform.

WSDM groups management functions into sets of properties, operations and events that together provide the information needed to perform specific management tasks. WSDM defines a basic set of standard capabilities that can be extended: Identity, Description, Metrics, Configuration, State, Operational Status and Advertisement.

WSDM supports two kinds of relationships: simple information about a relationship between resources, and those that have their own properties and behavior and are accessible via Web services directly. Relationships can be discovered from manageable resources directly or from relationship registries.

The WSDM Event Format (WEF) is an XML format that enables interpretation of management events from different sources. The WEF organizes event data into three categories: the event reporter, the event source and situation data, each of which contains a few standard properties found in most management events and may be extended to add situation-specific data.

WSDM provides the foundation for integrated management of business systems across a corporation and between corporations. This evolution will eventually eliminate the need for management-specific infrastructures, custom integration of managers and custom business system-management applications.

Kreger is a management and Web services architect for IBM and co-chair of the OASIS WSDM Technical Committee. She can be reached at kreger@us.ibm.com.