7.4 Role of Intelligent Agents in Internetwork Management

Management interfaces and protocols define their rules of engagement. Communication between them is carried over a management network. The management agent acts as a proxy who represents the real world for management purposes. The management system acts as a proxy for the operational support organization. The management hierarchy is simply described in Figure 5 (Clemm 2007).















Figure 5: How a manager and agent relate to each other

7.4 Role of Intelligent Agents in Internetwork Management

In some cases, some network elements offer a function which subordinate systems can act as "equalizers," providing external "intelligent" agents for devices that are otherwise more limited in their functionality, as shown in Figure 6 (Clemm 2007). In those cases, the subordinate system acts de facto as a management gateway, offering a set of higher-level functionality at the interface that it exposes in its agent role and mapping this to more primitive capabilities offered by the managed system below. We get back to the subject of management gateways in the next section (Clemm 2007).















Figure 6: A Subordinate Management Helper System as Equalizer