Intelligent remote monitoring

Intelligent monitoring facilities are of paramount importance in both service and network management as they provide the capability to monitor quality of service and utilisation parameters and notify degradations so that corrective action can be taken. By intelligent, we refer to the capability of performing the monitoring tasks in a way that has the smallest possible impact on the managed network, facilitates the observation and summarisation of information according to a number of criteria and, in its most advanced form, permits the specification of these criteria dynamically to suit the particular policy in hand. The OSI management metric monitoring and summarisation management functions provide models that only partially satisfy the above requirements. This paper describes our extensions to the proposed models to support further capabilities, with the intention to eventually lead to fully dynamically defined monitoring policies. The concept of distributing intelligence is also discussed, including the consideration of security issues and the applicability of the model in CORBA-based environments.