Service Availability: Principles and Practice

Chapter 4

The SA Forum Information Model: The Heart of Control and Monitoring

Maria Toeroe

Ericsson, Town of Mount Royal, Quebec, Canada

4.1 Introduction

This chapter introduces the Service Availability (SA) Forum information model, which was created to answer management needs and in particular that of the Availability Management Framework (AMF) to be discussed in Chapter 6. Subsequently the concepts of the AMF information model were applied to the management information of other Application Interface Specification (AIS) services; thus, the SA Forum information model was born.

The first question is why AMF needs an information model and what type of model it requires.

From Part I of the book one may see that SA management is all about coordination of the available resources so that at any moment in time there is at least one resource available in the system which is able to provide any given service that is required to be highly available. To pull off this attraction the availability manager needs to know or have a view of:

• the resources with their availability status and the services they are able provide;
• the services that the system needs to provide; and
• the relationship between these two sides.

What does all this mean when applied to some ‘random’ software application we want to be managed? To begin with someone needs to tell to our availability manager at least part of this information, that is, what the resources are and what services they should provide. They need to be ...