The most popular approach to systems management is the one based on the SNMP protocol. In this approach, each client machine runs an SNMP agent process that executes management procedures as directed by a central control station. The client machine is assumed to be connected to the network at all times. Studies have shown that SNMP based solutions are inflexible, less scalable, and difficult to manage for large environments [7, 8].
To address the scalability limitation of SNMP, researchers have proposed an alternate solution called Management by Delegation (MbD) [7]. In MbD, the central control station dispatches delegation agents to the client machines using a remote delegation protocol. The agents, which are a collection of procedures, are executed at the client machines by a delegation process. The results of the execution can either be pulled by or pushed to the control station. Although, the MbD based approach is more scalable than SNMP, it is still inflexible and difficult to manage as the procedures themselves are hard to modify and maintain.
At IBM Research's Watson site, system administrators have the responsibility of managing over 4000 machines consisting of IBM RiscSystem 6000s running the AIX operating system, and IBM PCs and laptops (running either Windows 95 or OS/2 operating system). The administrators currently use a central server solution for systems management (similar to SNMP). A maintenance daemon that implements necessary system administration specific commands executes on client machines. System administrators add commands to a well known file that is stored on a shared network file system. The daemon periodically monitors this file, reads commands and performs the necessary tasks on the client machine. The main challenges faced by the administrators are to handle heterogeneity of underlying systems, disconnected machines, and propagating changes to the maintenance daemon.