Visualizing Your Enterprise › Discovering IPv6 Network Devices using Common Discovery › Managed Objects

Managed Objects

Managed objects represent entities stored in the MDB that can be monitored and controlled using the Enterprise Management applications. These may include hardware, software applications, databases, and various business processes.

Managed objects have two distinct characteristics:

• They represent entities that have vendor-supplied agents or a product agent.
• They are derived from an existing class in the MDB that is itself derived from the ManagedObject class.

  Note: Only objects instantiated from the ManagedObjects class with the class property map_visible set to True are visible in the 2D Map.

System managed objects are different from ordinary objects. You can use a managed object to monitor and control the IT infrastructure entity that it represents. A managed object can represent anything: hardware, software, business process view, and so forth. Managed objects have the following characteristics:

Object Properties

Relate to the state of an object. An object usually has a set of possible states determined by its properties. A property, in turn, may be either an attribute or a relationship.

The terms property and method take on special meaning when used in the context of either class or instance. Therefore, we qualify the discussion when necessary by referring to class-level and instance-level properties and methods.

Object Methods

Determine the kind of behavior exhibited by the object. For example, an object modeling a satellite might have a method that calculates the satellite's position for display on a monitor.

Object Attribute

Specifies a type of property containing literal values. An object representing a PC would probably have a value for the number of printer ports available.

Object Relationships

Specifies a type of property denoting that a class or object relates in some way to another class or object. For example, a model object may have vendor information, which forms a relationship to a vendor object.

Topology

Presents a set of relationships among managed objects. Using a broad definition of topology simplifies the task of modeling object topology. Topology represents the set of relationships between objects. The simplicity of this definition allows for more flexible interpretation, wider functionality, and more powerful applications.