WBEM: The Heart Of SMS

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May 11, 1998

WBEM: The Heart Of SMS

By Richard Adhikari

t the heart of SMS 2.0 is Web-Based Enterprise Management, a collection of technologies designed to help manage the enterprise. Vendors developed these technologies, but WBEM will work independently of vendors, protocols, and management standards.

Each component in the managed environment is referred to as a managed object. Its properties, attributes, and other information are stored in classes. These classes are organized into association and inheritance hierarchies, which, in turn, are grouped by areas of interest such as networking, applications, and systems.

Each area of interest represents a schema, which is a subset of the information available about the managed environment. Users can add new classes and properties to the environment by attaching them to existing schema.

Users can describe and access data from various sources. This, together with the definition of a standard protocol over which the data can be published and accessed, provides platform and vendor independence and lets users physically distribute management solutions across the enterprise.

WBEM works with existing management protocols such as SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), DMI (Desktop Management Interface), and CMIP (Common Management Information Protocol). It integrates data from all these sources. Access to the data is provided by HMMP, the HyperMedia Management Protocol, which is based on modeling the managed environment as a collection of cooperating management entities.

HMMP lets users query the data obtained from management entities across the ne twork and to share this data between top-level applications. Data gathered at a local or site level through SNMP, CMIP, DMI, or other protocols is published beyond the site via HMMP to enterprise-management tools. This lets enterprise-management tools follow the trail of a fault or performance problem from where it shows up as a user's application error to the cause.

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