COSMOSDifferentiationToCommercialProducts

Background

COSMOS will deliver frameworks supporting SML throughout the application lifecycle. COSMOS will also deliver exemplary tools which illustrate the use of these frameworks. The COSMOS frameworks need to be useful to developers of commercial products, but the exemplary tools and the runtime components that they require serve a more limited role. This document illustrates some of the differences between the requirements for the COSMOS tools and commercial product offerings built on the COSMOS frameworks.

The difference between exemplary tools and commercial products is usually about the priorities of some of the requirements or the minimum acceptable level of completeness or performance in some areas rather than a fundamental difference of intent.

Focus

An exemplary tool should be useful to a developer. For example, a tool can demonstrate the value of the COSMOS frameworks by providing monitoring capabilities that can support a developer who is performing application profiling or load testing.

A commercial systems management product should be useful to a person with operational responsibility for deployed application infrastructure within a large enterprise.

Features

Features or aspects that may be required by a commercial product offering that are not essential to the runtime implementation of an exemplary tool include:

• Support for very large volumes of events and statistical data
• Retention of an extensive historical database
• Autonomic (active) system management
• Flexible ad hoc reporting
• Extensive canned reporting
• Deep analytic capabilities
• Support of blackout periods and other production schedule issues

TODO

Add information that is relevant to build to manage and modeling tools.