Managed nodes, with their associated management agents, are an integral part of any network management environment. Agent technology is moving away from monolithic fixed-function entities to intelligent, flexible agents with dynamic functionality.
This paper defines common components of agents and defines an architecture for combining these components to build flexible, intelligent agents with scalable performance and functionality. The proposed architecture builds intelligent agents from a number of separate function scalable software "engines".
As a case study, the architecture is used to build a hypothetical intelligent agent for controlling and monitoring network connected devices.