Managing Agent Platforms with SNMP

1. Managing Agent Platformswith SNMP Brian Remick Research Proposal Defense March 10, 2014

2. Overview • Motivation • Agent Management Requirements • Network Management • Research Overview • Architecture • Research Plan • Schedule and Questions

3. Motivation • Agent platforms are very complex. • Difficult to debug from a software perspective. • Difficult to analyze from an administrator’s perspective. • No formal management specification. • FIPA leaves this up to the platform implementation. • Thus, each implementation does it differently (if at all).

4. Create agents Destroy agents Move agents between containers Change agent state Basic Requirements

5. Advanced Requirements • Load balancing • Agent mobility • Communication pattern analysis

6. Agents can overload resources System resources (CPU, memory) Programmatic resources (Slow data structures) Identification of overloaded agents by: Communication level Resource usage Response time Platform-specific knowledge Management system should be able to: Identify agents that are degrading system performance. React to achieve balance in the platform. Redistribute agents. Create more agents to handle load. Load Balancing

7. Agents move between containers/platforms. Management system must keep track of this. Identify new agents arriving on platform. Follow agents to other platforms? Agent Mobility

8. Provide framework for communication analysis. Types of messages sent to/from an agent. Size Frequency Content Administrator can use this information to analyze communication patterns. Identify agent defects through communication behavior. Closely related to load balancing. Communication Patterns

9. Network Management • Basic Idea • Manage various resources of vastly different types. • Scalable, Flexible • Non-intrusive • As much as possible • Components of a network management system • Proxy “agents” • Communication protocol (SNMP) • Management system(s)

10. Network Management - Overview

11. Unfortunate terminology. Related to autonomous agents but not the same. Distributed pieces of software. Act as representatives for network resources Printers, routers, etc. Implement a standard interface accessible through a protocol. Exposes attributes / functionality of resource. Broadcast “traps” back to managers. Proxy “Agents”

12. A standard protocol is used to communicate between proxy agents and managers. Flexibility is key. Need to be able to facilitate interface for any resource. Simple Network Management Protocol One of the first. Industry standard. Protocol (SNMP)

13. Management Systems • MIB Browsers • Provide simple access to proxy agent interface. • Get / set values associated with resource. • Enterprise Management Systems • Sophisticated control over resources. • Ability to set thresholds, gather temporal data, graphs, etc. • Customizable: views of data, resource graphs • Designed for more than strictly network management. • Examples • HP Openview

14. Both solve similar problems Distributed resources Overload conditions Crashes Management of varying types of resources Use network management techniques in agent management domain Network management can be used to meet the requirements of agent management. Network and Agent Management

15. Research Overview • Goal: Build an agent platform management system. • Based on network management techniques. • Details: • Needs to meet the requirements mentioned earlier. • Using SNMP as the communication protocol. • Integrate with enterprise management system. • HP Openview • Demonstrate • Test the system with behaviorial patterns and simulations.

16. Based on FIPA specification Provides a standard platform specification to work from. Research could lead to a proposal for the FIPA spec. Implementation specific to Jade. Basic framework will be more general. Access to managed data is assumed. Platform must allow access to necessary data. Assumptions

17. Architecture

18. Need to implement the “proxy agent” for the platform. Implements a standard interface for agent management. Hides platform-specific details from the manager. Implementation in Jade framework: Actual FIPA-compliant agent living inside the platform. Allows accessibility to platform-specific information. Makes use of platform events / Introspection. Agent Platform Layer

19. Need to allow proxy agent and managers to communicate via SNMP. AgentX Framework that hides networking details of SNMP (UDP, etc.) Allows interface definition in SNMP without detailed knowledge of the underlying protocol. Focus more on effectiveness of interface than protocol itself. Managers communicate with AgentX Requests passed on to proxy agent via RPC. Proxy agent can send traps through AgentX to listening managers. SNMP Layer (AgentX)

20. Interface with management systems. MIB browser Enterprise system Take advantage of enterprise customization Customized views of containers Views of communication between agents HP Openview Event SDK GUI customizations Management System Layer

21. Interface definition in SNMP Proxy agent implementation in Jade Integration with AgentX framework Management system integration MIB browser Openview Testing Patterns of agent behavior Simulations Research Plan

22. Summary • System will be able to: • Perform basic management tasks. • Detect overloaded agents and perform load balancing. • Monitor communication between agents. • Detect agent mobility. • Integrated with industry-standard management tools. • HP Openview

23. Task Completion Date Percent Complete Proposal document 10/1/2001 95% Proposal defense 10/29/2001 Interface definition/MIB 11/10/2001 40% Proxy agent implementation 11/20/2001 40% AgentX integration 12/5/2001 30% MIB browser integration 12/15/2001 HP Openview plugin 1/20/2002 Pattern implementation 2/1/2002 Thesis document 3/1/2002 Thesis defense 4/2002 Schedule for Completion