An open framework for federating integrated management model of distributed IT environment

Heterogeneity has been the curse of the IT industry and systems management is no exception. As organizations are expanding their global business, and new technology and platforms are being introduced, the complexity of systems management is increasing rapidly due to heterogeneity and getting unified view of IT environments is becoming more difficult. To simplify and expedite information integration, this paper brings best practices of model-driven system and information integration to the problems of information integration in systems management. Specifically, we present an open framework for describing meta-model of a new component in isolation using UML and relating it with meta-models of other components through semantic relationships. The resulting integrated meta-model together with querying mechanisms for various sources can federate automatically and on-demand, integrated model of IT environment without relying on a central database repository. ©2008 IEEE.