The international standards bodies ISO and
ITU-T developed standards for network management around 1990. A whole
family of network management standards were produced covering protocols,
modelling, basic services and a modelling language. The modelling language came to be called GDMO.
GDMO is short for 'Guidelines for the
Definition of Managed Objects'. It is a specification language that specifies managed object classes.
Managed objects define the
management information transferred between computer systems that use the
OSI protocol CMIP.
Strictly speaking 'Guidelines for the
Definition of Managed Objects' is the name of an international
standard published jointly by ITU-T and ISO. The ISO reference number
for this standard is ISO 10165-4
and the ITU-T reference number
is ITU-T Recommendation
X.722. When people talk about GDMO they are usually talking about this
modelling language although to be strictly accurate GDMO is only the name of this document.
The OSI management model, protocols and
services were used to develop the TMN (Telecommunications Management Network) that
is the main management scheme adopted by the traditional telecommunications
industry. In contrast data networks and specifically the internet use SNMP.
More recently network management solutions use distributed object
technologies such as CORBA and COM.
This site provides an overview of GDMO, the
specification language. The
Templates section describe the basic
components of the language. There are some examples of the use of the
templates in the Examples section. The CMIP operations
are illustrated in the Operations section.
A brief overview of the protocols are described in the Protocol
section.
