1. A method of organizing a peer agent application for managing a number of different server systems which operate under the control of a number of different network operating systems, each server system comprising a plurality of components and at least one management information base (MIB) component for storing information describing a set of server specific variables and the hierarchy used in managing server hardware components, and a local agent component which communicates over a communications network using a standard request/response protocol for processing requests received over the network, the peer agent being organized in a modular fashion for facilitating porting to different network operating systems in addition to extensive component reuse and the method comprising the steps of: (a) providing a first peer agent extension software module in the server system operative to communicate with the local agent component over a first programmable interface using a first type of standard protocol, the first software module including operating system specific routines for communicating with the network operating system controlling the server system; (b) providing an independent abstraction application program interface in the server system for communicating through a second protocol which uses a small set of non-network operating system specific instrumentation commands and a defined set of control data structures; (c) providing a second instrumentation module in the server system which operatively couples to the MIB component, the second instrumentation module including a number of server specific instrumentation components which operatively couple to the different server components and include mechanisms for directly managing hardware specific information variables described in the MIB component obtained from the server components of the server system; and, (d) incorporating into the first peer extension module and the second instrumentation module respectively, first and second mechanisms for communicating between the first and second modules over the abstraction interface, requests and responses from the second instrumentation module obtained from the instrumentation components managing the different server components using the instrumentation commands and control data structures coded for representing the requests and responses.