The network management community has been pushed towards the design of alternative management approaches able to support heterogeneity, scalability, reliability, and minor human intervention. The employment of self-* properties and Peer-To-Peer (P2P) are seen as promising alternatives, able to provide the sophisticated solutions required.

Despite being developed in parallel, and with minor direct connections perceived between them, self-* properties and P2P can be used concurrently. In "Self-* and P2P for Network Management: Design Principles and Case Studies," the authors explore the issues behind the joint use of self-* properties and P2P, and present: a survey relating autonomic computing and self-* properties, P2P, and network and service management; the design of solutions that explore parallel and cooperative behavior of management peers; the change in angle of network management solution development from APIs, protocols, architectures, and frameworks to the design of management algorithms.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th IFIP/IEEE International Workshop on Distributed Systems, Operations and Management, DSOM 2007, held in San Jose, CA, USA, in October 2007 in the course of the 3rd International Week on Management of Networks and Services, Manweek 2007.

The 20 revised full papers and 5 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on decentralized and peer-to-peer management, fault detection and diagnosis, performance tuning and dimensioning, problem detection and mitigation, operations and tools, service accounting and auditing, Web services and management.