As with any other kind of managed resource, generic configuration management information (manufacturer, product name and version, installation date, etc.) and properties relevant for fault management (support contact, time since last restart and its usage, operational and administrative states) are relevant for managing MSs. If an MS supports delegation, information about the supported scripting languages or the version of the execution engines should be available. From the inventory perspective, it is also necessary to provide an overview about the installed components, their versions and their states (e.g., the installed system modules, the database and the management applications, the type of available delegated management functionality) and the corresponding process names.
The gathering of licensing data relevant for accounting management like the kind of product license (nodelocked, domain-bound, floating), the maximum and the actual amount of MS users is necessary because many commercial MS products are equipped with license servers. A high amount of rejected requests due to an insufficient number of licenses indicates that additional licenses should be purchased. This may concern either the number of concurrent users of the MS or the number of managed nodes. Appropriate counters need to be provided.
Security is a major concern in distributed environments where several MSs are acting as peers: there is a need to provide information about the management domains an MS is involved in and the agents, MLMs and MGs it is responsible for. If an MS is able to configure another one, every involved system needs to maintain on the one hand view-related access control mechanisms for protecting itself against unauthorized access and on the other hand information about its own capability set, i.e., what kind of interactions with peer MSs are permitted.
Performance-related information includes parameters for configuring MLM caching properties like the cache size or the maximum aging time for the cached data. Counters for the time an MS takes for serving a request and the number of requests per interval (minutes, hours) may indicate performance bottlenecks requiring additional MLMs.
Additional information needed to control MGs encompasses the architectures the MG translates, the names and versions of the management information models and protocols supported. Of equal importance are counters for (successful, erroneous) translated PDUs and information related to the mapping of managed object references.