Event Aggregation and Distribution in Web-based Management Systems

As networks grow in size, managers rely increasingly on asynchronous notifications (events) for most management tasks. With the increasing popularity of the web as a means of providing access to network management services, there is a strong demand for enabling platforms that provide these services in a scalable and cost-effective way. This paper presents the architecture of the event generation and distribution subsystem of the Marvel [ANE98d] distributed management environment. The latter allows the network manager to define new event types by aggregating lower level events and make them available to a variety of client applications through the brokerage services of a distributed computing environment. Events are serialized objects that can carry Java byte code to display themselves according to the event consumer’s graphical capabilities, or possibly take a corrective action if the event corresponds to a fault condition. Event filtering and aggregation is performed by an external process, operating under the control of the Marvel event management service. The architecture has been applied on an existing management platform based on Marvel for a home broadband access service.