Effective management of a network requires network partitioning that reflects both organizational and functional groupings. An example of organizational grouping is the partitioning of managed objects into groups that follow some logical, or convenient, rationale (e.g. geographical, et al.). An example of functional grouping is the partitioning of managed objects by management activity or functional areas of responsibility (e.g. fault, configuration, accounting, performance, and security).
In practice, both aspects are related and the need to flexibly control creation, modification and their relationships over time is needed. Additional mechanisms are required that enable the application and management of policies to these groupings. An example of a policy in this context is: for a group of managed systems to send fault reports to Managing system "x" between 08:00 and 18:00 hours and at other times send to Managing system "y".
Recommendations X.701 and X.749 provide an X.700 based method for satisfying this need by defining partitions of managed objects as management domains, policies as management policy objects, and the intersection between the two as a management juridiction.
Management information and messages are defined to control creation of domains and, any, later changes as necessary to that domain using X.700 based messages.