Chapter 1. Management Concepts

The term management is grossly overused in the computer industry. It is often the responsibility of a management system to take care of installation and configuration of a resource into a computer system. After a resource is installed, the management system should be able to start it, monitor it to be sure it is performing well, change its behavior through reconfiguration or operations, and stop it. The first thing this book is going to do is define management and the terms to describe management, and then identify the aspects of management that are addressed by Java Management Extensions (JMX) ^[1] .

This chapter gives a short history of management systems and an overview of management architectures and technologies. Building on this basis, we will discuss the management lifecycle, resulting management disciplines, management data and operations, and then how all of these things are combined into management applications and systems.

Most of this chapter is not specific to JMX, and if you have a background in management and management technologies, you may choose to move on to Chapter 2 (Introduction to JMX). If you are new to management, having a basic understanding of management technology will help you understand the terminology used in this book, in the JMX specification, and by management system vendors . It will also give you the background you may need to develop or integrate with a management system.

Resources use JMX to make themselves manageable by a management system. JMX is an isolation and mediation layer between manageable resources and management systems. Why do we need this decoupling of the manager and the managed? A quick look at the history of management systems and technologies will make clear how we came to need JMX for the Java platform.