Network management with acquisition of formatted dump data from remote process

A method of selectively obtaining formatted dump data from a remote software product (18) employs an open Manager-Agent concept, where the Agent (17) is represented by the remote software product (18) and the Manager is represented by the local customer/vendor management station (21). A dump object is defined; this object exists at the Agent (17) and is exposed to Manager (21) for modification, e.g., specification of a value. Modification of the dump object by the Manager (21) will cause the Agent (17) to selectively create/store a formatted storage dump for one or more of software products components (18). The Manager (21) retrieves the formatted dump data from the Agent (17) using a standard/open file transfer mechanism; since the dump data is formatted at the Agent (17) (rather than by the receiver, i.e., manager (21)) the problem of transmitting large amounts of data across a network is minimized or eliminated. This method is product and product-level independent; since the Manager (21) and Agent (17) interactions do not involve product-specific logic, it can be used to selectively obtain formatted dump data from any software product, and, since the formatting is done by the Agent (17), there is no problem in matching the level of the format routine to the product level. The Manager-Agent interactions are network management protocol independent, and may use a standard such as SNMP.