Intelligent management of network devices aided by a strategy and a tool

The increasing decentralization of computational resources and the need for distributed and heterogeneous systems management have motivated the development of strategies and tools to assist network administrators in a great part of their tasks through automatic monitoring of devices. Combining the ideas of pervasive computing and software agents, this work presents a tool for monitoring devices distributed in a network and guided by a well-defined strategy. The tool uses intelligent software agents as the main monitoring mechanism.