An Approach for Managing Service Dependencies with XML and the Resource Description Framework

  • Authors:
  • Christian Ensel;Alexander Keller

  • Affiliations:
  • Munich Network Management Team, University of Munich, Oettingenstr. 67, 80538 Munich, Germany/ ensel@nm.informatik.uni-muenchen.de;IBM Research Division, T.J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704. Yorktown Heights, New York 10598/ alexk@us.ibm.com

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Network and Systems Management
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

We describe a novel approach for applying XML, XPath, and Resource Description Framework (RDF) to the problem of describing, querying and computing the dependencies among services in a distributed computing system. This becomes increasingly important in today's networked environments where applications and services rely on both local and outsourced sub-services. However, service dependencies are not made explicit in today's systems, thus making the task of problem determination particularly difficult. A key contribution of the paper is a web-based architecture for retrieving and handling dependency information from various managed resources. Its core component is a dependency query facility allowing the application of queries and filters to dependency models; its output is a consolidated dependency graph that can then be used by fault management applications to perform additional problem determination tasks or event correlation. The definition of an XML-based notation for specifying dependencies facilitates information sharing between the components involved in the process.