The book's subtitle is 'Concepts, Architectures and Their Operational Application' and this is a fair summary of the contents. It starts with an overview of networking and of the requirements for management of networked systems.

Part two discusses the main management architectures in use today. It covers OSI, Internet (SNMP), CORBA, DMTF Desktop management interface, Web-based architectures (such as JMAPI) and gateways between different architectures. It intentionally does not cover proprietary architectures. Coverage is broad rather than deep: each chapter could easily be expanded into a whole book.

Part three covers the different categories of management tools. These include obvious ones such as protocol analysers, event and performance monitoring tools and others which are perhaps less obvious, such as problem tracking systems and document management systems. A chapter covers tools for developing management applications.

Part four introduces a process model for describing the operation of network systems and how system management tools can be used in support of these processes. Unfortunately this section has been translated from German directly into management-speak and I found it very heavy going. A short final section explores likely future developments.

This book is likely to be of specialist interest only. The typical system manager will probably be most interested in the details of how to use the features of his favourite management tools, but this book deliberately does not discuss the details of specific vendors' products. It would be more useful to someone who is setting the strategy for an organisation and selecting tools to support the strategy. It could also be useful to designers of system management tools, who want to improve on the current state of the art.