Network Monitoring with Asynchronous Notifications in Web Service Environments

With the ongoing growth of the Internet, a reliable communications infrastructure becomes more and more important. To monitor large networks, asynchronous notifications are needed to inform management systems about critical events. The SNMP framework provides Traps which have been used for monitoring successfully for many years. However, due to shortcomings of SNMP, XML and Web services get more and more attention from the network management community. If the new technologies should replace the existing ones, they must also provide asynchronous notifications. In this paper, we describe notification solutions in traditional as well as in new management frameworks. Moreover, we compare them with a simple approach based on Web services we have implemented.