The management of the K2 server is based on the Distributed Management Architecture (DUMA) which is shown in Figure. The K2 Management can create a managed object for any instance of a resource and registers it with the Management Agent. The Management Agent provides a unified access interface to any of these managed objects. Additionally the Management Agent is extensible by accepting managed objects that are actually implemented by a Python script and are used to implement intelligence for handling certain runtime or error conditions locally without the interference of a centralised management tool.

The user interface to all the Management Agents of a cluster can be done using HTTP or IIOP. Figure 8 shows the different hierarchy levels that are possible to display. Each of the instances in each level has properties and actions associated with it depending on the type of the instance.

The following property categories are distinguishable:

• Performance Management
  
  
• Fault Management
  
  
• Configuration Management (Deployment)
  
  
• Security Management
  
  
• Auditing and Accounting Management (Logging Service)

The Distributed Management Architecture allows the implementation of local intelligence using the Python Scripting language. Those Management scripts that are stored and executed on each single node can react on system or application events and perform any management task automatically. An example of these management tasks include the implementation of policies for starting and stopping server processes in accordance to the number of requests and usage profiles for a particular component. The code for one such Python Managed Object is shown in Figure 9.

Using scripting allows for easy on-site customisation because compilation is not required. The user defined Python script can access the K2server functions by a Python extension library.