The standard involved, WSDM (Web Services for Distributed Management) is an Oasis standard backed by the reigning powers of systems management: IBM, CA, and HP. This week, IBM is posting tools on its developer alphaWorks site, and is also adding WSDM support to several Tivoli products.

Specifically, the Tivoli products involved include Intelligent Orchestrator, which automates the series of steps (e.g., provisioning, configuration and deployment) for migrating software into production; and Provisioning Manager, which automates manual tasks such as configuring servers and other system resources like operating systems or network devices. According to IBM, this is the first of a wave of Tivoli, WebSphere, and other software group products that will add WSDM support over the next year.

Meanwhile, on the skunk works side, IBM is making WSDM point tools available for developers to play with through alphaWorks. They include tools to build WSDM endpoints or interfaces, a tool for simulating autonomic management environments, and a spreadsheet based tool for composing tasks using WSDM headers.

Of course, nothing in the systems management world is ever easy. Way back when, when SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) was invented, it provided standards tags for getting data out of network devices.

To its credit, SNMP cleared the way for the emergence of distributed systems management products like HP OpenView, CA Unicenter, and IBM Tivoli because it provided a standard way to poll devices. The downside is that the bits of information collected by SNMP, known as Management Information Blocks (or MIBs), were so generic that a series of more meaningful, proprietary MIBs emerged.

Is history repeating itself with WSDM? Yes and no. Like SNMP, WSDM currently sticks with pretty generic syntax for categorizing the kinds of events reported by systems management tools. But the syntax looks pretty useful, with event categories for availability, capability, configuration, stop and start, create and destroy, dependency, report, connect, and other. It looks like a good start, because the categories answer the first questions systems that admins would want to know when troubleshooting an event.

But lurking in the shadows is a rival spec from an unlikely grouping of Microsoft, Sun, BMC, Dell, Intel, and AMD called WS-Management. Sun is implementing WS-Management in Solaris 10, creating an implementation in Java, while Microsoft is to support it in Windows Server 2003 starting with R2.