The Internet has become extremely popular as a distributed environment for delivering services to users. However, with the wide use of the Internet as a commercial service delivery vehicle to end customers, the current service management functions that exist in the Internet are somewhat inadequate. Internet management has traditionally been network element oriented, i.e., focusing on managing the state and connectivity of the physical network. Service management which supports improved quality of service is required--an evolution similar to that faced by the telecommunications industries.
Although Internet management is facing similar issues to that of telecommunication service management, a critical issue for Internet management is to provide a distributed and scalable management solution for managing a large range of heterogeneous services to large number of end users.
This paper examines the issues of Internet services management and compares it with the service management approaches taken by the telecommunication industry. The paper suggests that the approaches taken in telecommunication industry offer a very sound framework for defining Internet service management.