Network Management Fundamentals

Chapter 9. Management Organization: Dividing the Labor

You learned earlier in this book that management tasks are typically split up and jointly accomplished by systems that play different roles. The managing system, in a manager role, communicates with a managed system in an agent role. This suggests that management is typically organized in what amounts to a client/server model, in which a management application (one client) manages the various systems and devices on the network (many servers). However, this is not the only way in which management can be organized; different variations are possible.

We presented a number of examples of such variations earlier in this book: The TMN reference architecture that we discussed in Chapter 5, “Management ...