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Create automated and distributed management applications with Jiro technology

With Sun's new Jiro technology, you can develop sophisticated Java and Jini-based applications that manage distributed resources

By Mark A. Carlson, JavaWorld.com, 02/01/00

These days, the management of distributed resources primarily entails status monitoring. While the increasing instrumentation of these resources has allowed administrators to view their status through a common console or management framework, today's standard operating procedure is more reactive than anticipatory.

Even though events are generated for such problems as failures, performance crises, and capacity limitations, the sheer number of these events in any reasonably sized environment can make it difficult to understand the root cause of a problem. Event-correlation engines can help, but often themselves introduce more complexity. Considering all this, a new design model is needed to significantly reduce the costs and complexity of managing distributed resources.

In order to automate the management of these distributed resources, such automation software needs to execute on multiple platforms distributed across the enterprise. No single management station can scale to the required size for this automation or provide the robustness and reliability required. Thus, organizations more and more often turn to Java for management, not only for use in Web-based graphical user interfaces (GUIs), but also as the infrastructure for the management applications themselves. To achieve the required platform independence, Sun recently introduced its Jiro technology.

Using Jiro for management

Jiro implements an infrastructure for creating integrated and automated management software in a distributed, cross-platform environment. That infrastructure, a standard extension to the Java platform, is specified by the Federated Management Architecture (FMA). Jiro goes further than just platform independence, however, and introduces Jini-connection technology for distributed management across a network. Jini's leasing, for example, provides a mechanism for allowing management services to come and go in the network, and provides the software that uses these services to recover the associated connections.

Moreover, Jiro introduces a middle tier of management between the thin-client Java GUIs popular today and such Java-based agent technologies as Java Management Extensions (JMX) and the Java Dynamic Management Kit (JDMK). (For more on management issues, see Max Goff's Java management series in JavaWorld; there are links in the Resources section below). This middle tier is where the automation of management can take place, as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Three-tier distributed management with the Jiro technologies



The requirements for this middle tier were determined by an analysis of distributed management and the resources that need to be monitored and controlled. Each resource, whether it is a physical device or a software service, consists of a functional part and a management part. The functional part performs the functions of that resource, such as routing packets or storing data; the management part configures and controls the resource.

There may be several resources processing the data as it moves from the application to its eventual destination -- a disk drive, for example. The functional part of these resources through which the data passes is called the data path.

Resources
  • Max Goff's Java management series