Copyright (c) 2003 Manning Publications Co. All rights reserved.
Protocol (SNMP). For applications like web sites, most enterprise developers must either use the
management tools that come built-in with the application (and the web servers that drive the
application) or write their own tools. As mentioned earlier, resource management includes both
application and hardware aspects.
Hardware and network management
Most network monitoring and management systems today use an SNMP solution to provide
monitoring and management capabilities for hardware. SNMP is a monitoring standard that has
been in wide use for several years. For the example Internet bike shop, you would use SNMP to
monitor the health and activity of the servers running your web site and back-end applications.
Information about managed devices is stored in a Management Information Base (MIB). The
MIB is a hierarchical representation of information about devices. A managed device can be
located on a MIB tree using an object name or object identifier. An example name might be
iso.identified-organization.dod.internet.private.enterprise.myenterprise.myvariables.myProduct or
something similar. An object identifier is set of numbers that represents the textual name. (For
more information about MIBs, read the SNMP specifications at http://www.ietf.org.)
Fortunately, many hardware vendors provide MIB definitions and SNMP hooks into their
devices. However, due to the difficulty of SNMP development, few applications have hooks into
SNMP.
SNMP development is not an easy task, and most developers are not trained to tackle it.
Unfortunately, SNMP does not easily provide monitoring and management for applications like
your bicycle store. For everyday Java developers, working with SNMP is not a suitable option.
Application management
When they’re creating applications, software companies often do not think about runtime
configuration and management; so, at deployment time, there is usually a scramble to figure out
how to maintain the system and be informed of critical events. Some companies develop their
own tools for management or build management consoles directly into their products. For many
companies, application management comes from the platform that hosts their application: the web
or application server.
When the bicycle shop web site and application were developed, you had to consider the
health of not only your application, but also the application server, web server, and database (as
well as any other software systems). Without a standard and consistent management platform,
you might have to write specific code in order to expose application properties, health, and
statistics. In fact, the manner in which you manage your application will likely change if you
purchase a different monitoring solution.
In today’s typical management environment, IT personnel will always be in a reactionary
mode when maintaining applications. Hardware and application management solutions are often
developed ad hoc at deployment time. In fact, currently it is difficult to develop a generic,
reusable management and monitoring solution for applications.
1.1.2 The ideal management environment
An ideal management environment would have a proactive capability for dealing with problems.
A management system would constantly monitor the health of both devices and applications. If a
device was down, the management system could discover an alternative device, reroute services
to the alternate, and notify the administrator of the problem. For instance, if the bicycle shop’s
