VTAM® CMIP services is designed to provide information through VTAM to network and systems management application programs that conform to the OSI standards for systems management. CMIP services provides application writers a set of common functions that can be used to create CMIP agent and manager application programs more quickly than would otherwise be possible.

The relationship between CMIP agent and manager application programs is defined by the International Standards Organization (ISO) in terms of a managing system and a managed system. The managing system is the CMIP manager application program and the managed system is the CMIP agent application program.

With the functions provided by CMIP services, application programmers can write application programs that monitor resources in a network. Through CMIP services, a topology agent application program sends information about resources in the network to a topology manager application program that analyzes and displays the resources.

The VTAM topology agent, which resides on the VTAM host, is an agent application program that collects topology information to send to a manager application program through CMIP services. For information about the VTAM topology agent, see Introduction to VTAM topology agent. Communication between the manager and agent application programs that are on different systems is over APPC sessions using Open System Interconnection (OSI) Common Management Information Protocol (CMIP) and Systems Network Architecture (SNA). For more information on CMIP over SNA, see IBM® SystemView® Mapping of OSI Upper Layers to MDS for CMIP over SNA for APPN and SNA Subarea Management.