Resource management and JMX - JMX in Action - page 5

today with our vision of the perfect environment. (The disparity between the two
may surprise you.) Then, we'll look at what you can achieve in terms of typical
development resources, effort, and support.

1.1.1 Today's management environment

Today's management solutions can be divided into two categories: network and
application. The most common tool used for networking (hardware) manage-
ment is Simple Network Management 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 applica-
tion) 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 an MIB tree using an object name or
object identifier. An example name might be iso.identified-organization.dod.inter-
net.private.enterprise.myenterprise.myvariables.myProduct or something similar.
An object identifier is set of numbers that represents the textual name. (For more
information about MIB s, 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 appli-
cations 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 man-
agement 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