System management in IT organizations faces growing complexity and the need to operate more in ad-hoc, collaborative, cross-domain environments. Management systems today are built for rather small organizations in the order of 10{sup}3 elements and structured in domains. System management today relies on static hierarchical, reconfigured organization. Involvement of human operators causes the need for effective visualization of a diversity of management-related information. With the desire towards ad-hoc collaboration across organizations, specifically fostered by grids. static, well-known and reconfigured management topologies are becoming hard to maintain. Dynamic topology creation and exploration is needed when new collaborations are established. Topology across organizational domain is also called management overlay. Algorithms are needed that can self-organize topology, as well as algorithms that can render and update the layout for visualizing topology information presenting management information on operator consoles. Changes constantly occurring in an ad-hoc topology need to be updated and presented accordingly. The paper discusses ad-hoc topologies and impact on management systems. The paper is based on experiments with various algorithms with self-organizing capabilities and hyperbolic visualization techniques for visualizing ad-hoc topologies for management overlays.
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