Dynamic dependencies in application service management

This paper addresses the role of dependency analysis in distributed management. It introduces the concept of dependency lifetime that traces the flow of dependency information from the design to installation to runtime stages of a service. Two categories of models, functional and structural, are used to represent this information as it flow from the design to the runtime stages. The paper describes how the dependency information at each of these stages can be retrieved and evaluated by management applications and presents an architecture to integrate these with existing network management platforms.