The management standards address the problem of keeping the Web Services up-and-running. This problem has two complementary aspects: the management of the Web Services themselves and the management of the machines and networks where they execute. Currently, the standardization efforts are focused on the latter kind of management.

There are two competing standards for the management of machines and networks using Web Services.

WS-Management defines the minimum implementation requirements for a set of systems management operations that allow: resource discovery, configuration parameters management, logs access, subscription of asynchronous notification events, and other specific management operations.

WS-DistributedManagement also specifies system resources management operations. WS-Provisioning defines interoperability rules between provisioning systems for resource attribution and user privileges.