Policy Based Self-Management in Distributed Environments

Currently, increasing costs and escalating complexities are primary issues in the distributed system management. The policy based management is introduced to simplify the management and reduce the overhead, by setting up policies to govern system behaviors. Policies are sets of rules that govern the system behaviors and reflect the business goals or system management objectives. This paper presents a generic policy-based management framework which has been integrated into an existing distributed component management system, called Niche, that enables and supports self-management. In this framework, programmers can set up more than one Policy-Manager-Group to avoid centralized policy decision making which could become a performance bottleneck.