The conventional approach to the dynamic management of distributed systems?represented by such standards as SNMP for network management and WSDM for service oriented computing (SOC)?relies on the components of the managed system to cooperate in the management process, by providing the managers with the means to monitor their state and activities, and to control their behavior. 

This paper argues that this approach to management has some serious deficiencies, when applied to open, SOC-based system.
In particular, we show that such management tends to be unreliable and inflexible, when the system being management is based on SOC.
It is our thesis that the above mentioned difficulties can be addressed?although not entirely eliminated?by complementing the conventional approach to management with an appropriate regulation of the flow of messages in the system.
This gives rise to what we call a Regulation-Based Management (RBM) mechanism, which is introduced in this paper.