In recent years some concepts have been developed to overcome the deficiencies of centralized management architectures. Examples are the Management by Delegation (MbD) paradigm, flexible agents and mobile agent technologies to build a flexible distributed management system. In such a system it is possible to delegate management functionality from the manager to the agents and there should be the ability to extend agents at runtime. Besides other features these "new" agents should have a higher degree of autonomy to act and react.
In a typical customer/provider scenario a customer demands - and pays for - a certain Quality of Service (QoS) laid down in so-called Service Level Agreements (SLAs). To proof the fulfillment of those SLAs it would be very helpful for the provider to have a flexible and extensible agent at the customer site which can monitor service usage and can even trigger active tests. The fact that an agent belonging to the provider is running at the site of the customer implies strong security requirements.
The paper shows how the concepts and services of the Java Dynamic Management Kit (JDMK) can be used for building such an architecture. It also shows weaknesses and deficiencies JDMK still has to deal with. As an example of how the monitoring of QoS parameters can be done, a web browser was instrumented using the Application Response Measurement (ARM) API to deliver information about the actual response times a customer is experiencing.
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 gives an overview about the scenario the paper deals with and shows the requirements a management solution for this scenario has to fulfill. In section 3 JDMK and the ARM API which are both used in building our solution are introduced. Section 4 describes how we applied JDMK and ARM to the problem domain. An example how real QoS parameters can be obtained is shown. Section 5 summarizes our experiences and evaluates how JDMK and ARM are suitable for monitoring SLAs in large enterprise environments.