Automatic Policy Mapping to Management System Configurations

Policies enable management systems to adapt to changes in management strategies. At run time, management agents use information from the policies to monitor attributes of managed objects, to determine if specific events have occurred and to take management actions. In order to do this, information from the policies must first be extracted. The extracted information is then used to configure management agents, as well as other elements of an underlying management system, in order to enforce the given policies. We refer to this as policy mapping. The challenge in automating policy mapping is, given a set of policies, how to extract the relevant information and then identify, configure and instantiate the required management agents within the scope and constraints of an existing management system. This paper presents an approach for automatic policy mapping assuming an underlying commercial management system.