Integration of SNMP into a CORBA- and Web-Based Management Environment

The management of networks, distributed systems, and distributed applications is an important and growing field in computer science. Besides the classical architectures like SNMP and OSI management, the introduction of new technologies such as the World Wide Web with Java and the availability of standard middleware architectures like CORBA have brought up new challenges. Future developments in the management domain will probably be at least Web-based. However, in any case they should be “integrated”. We present some ideas to integrate both Web-based and CORBA-based techniques into management platforms and discuss new strategies for the integration of the emerging approaches and the classical architectures. We also describe our implementation of an SNMP-CORBA gateway which covers the translation of the information model as well as the communication model. We have extended our System Configuration Tool (SCOT) by a full CORBA interface. Its Web interface has been extended by a generic generator for HTML pages with integrated, and appropriately parameterised applets, which allow to access the SCOT repository as well as other CORBA-based management entities, such as our CORBA-SNMP gateway.