A JMX Toolkit for Merging Network Management Systems
Feng Lu Kris Bubendorfer
School of Mathematical and C omputing Sciences
Victoria University of Wellington,
P. O . Box 600 Wellington, New Zealand,
Email: Feng.Lu@mcs.vuw.ac.nz, kris@mcs.vuw.ac.nz
Abstract
The ever increasing size of netwo rks has resulted in
a corresponding escalation of administration costs
and lengthy deployment cycles. Clearly, more s c al-
able and flexible network ma nagement systems a re
required to repla c e existing centralised services. The
work described in this paper for ms part of a new
network management sy stem that fuses dynamic ex-
tensibility, Java Management Extension (JMX), and
mobile ag e nts. The primary fo c us is on integra-
tion with the many widely deployed legacy SNMP-
based network management systems. One of the pri-
mary contributions is the design of a generic SNMP
adaptor to enable JMX compliant agents to be ac-
cessed by SNMP-base d management applications. A
set of SNMP APIs have been developed to support
the development of the SNMP adaptor. A number
of o ther tools have been developed to support the
SNMP adaptor, these include: a Management Infor-
mation Base (MIB) compiler that automatically gen-
erates MBeans representing a given SNMP MIB; and
a SNMP proxy se rvice to allow non-SNMP manage-
ment applications to a c c ess the SNMP agent using a
variety of protocols.
Keywords: JMX, Network Manage ment, SNMP
1 Introduction
Traditional network management (NM) approaches,
such as SNMP (Simple Network Management Proto-
col) and CMIP (Co mmo n Management Information
Protocol), are based on a sta tic centralised manage-
ment platform: a centralised manager acting as client
controls the entire network through agents w hich re-
side in each network node acting as server. Agents
are responsible for monitoring and controlling man-
aged objects in the network. The manager has the
responsibility of collecting data from agents, inter-
preting that data and dire cting the agents (Yemini
et al. 1991). However, with the rapid growth of net-
works, such approaches are no lo nger suitable as the
increasing complexity of these systems re sults in high
administration costs and long deployment cycles. The
Copyright
c
2006, Australian Computer Society, Inc. This pa-
per appeared at Twenty-Ninth Australasian Computer Science
Conference (ACSC2006), Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, Jan-
uary 2006. Conferences in Research and Practice in Informa-
tion Technology, Vol. 48. Vladimir Estivill-Castro and Gill
Dobiie, Ed. Reproduction for academic, not-for profit purposes
perm itted provided this text is included.
need for more scalable and flexible network manage-
ment approaches is leading to greater decentralisa-
tion (Simoes 19 99).
Dynamic extensibility is one of the solutions that
has been used to support the distributed network
management model. The extensible agent can add
or delete managed objects and manag e ment services
at run time upon requests by other management e n-
tities. Recently, Sun Micros ystems intr oduced a set
of standards to equip Java with an extensible agent
model for distributed management, k nown as Java
Management Extension (JMX).
JMX aims to achieve the g oal of scalable, dis-
tributed network management (JMX1.2 2002). Its
support for mobile code enables the transfer of
lightweight applications to management agents at
runtime, delegates the management tasks from a cen-
tralised manager to management agents distributed
around the network, and place the management tasks
closer to the management data. This reduces network
traffic and increases sc alability (Lange et al. 1999).
Also, the JMX component based architecture allows
each JMX reso urce or service to be plugged into or re-
moved from the management agent dynamically, de-
pending on the runtime network requirements. This
means that a JMX based implementation can scale
from small ha ndho ld devices to large telecommunica-
tions switches.
However, legacy management systems a re still
widely deployed. Network managers have to rely on
the legacy management protocol to access the net-
work resources in the heterogeneous network envi-
ronment. Therfore, a JMX based solution needs to
coexist with and integrate with traditional network
management systems, like SNMP, instead of re plac-
ing them. It is attractive and cost-efficient to develop
and deploy a distributed management system using
JMX that can c ooperate with deployed legacy sys -
tem. This interoperability can be achieve d by equip-
ping the JMX-based solution with SNMP capability.
Without it, the JMX-based solution will not become a
general solution for distributed network management.
The research effo rts presented in this paper fo-
cus on the the integration of JMX with traditional
SNMP-based network management systems. One of
the primary contributions is the design of a ge neric
SNMP adaptor to enable JMX compliant agents to be
accessed by SNMP-based management applications.
A set of SNMP APIs have been developed to support
the development of the SNMP adaptor. A number
of o ther tools have been developed to support the
SNMP adaptor, these include: a Management Infor-
mation Base (MIB) compiler that automatically gen-
erates MBeans representing a given SNMP MIB; and
a SNMP proxy service to allow non-SNMP manage-
ment applications to access the SNMP agent using a
variety of protocols.