Storage Area Network (storage area network) management employs agents, each under the control of a common server. Determination and assignment of available agents to candidate manageable entities suffers from several deficiencies. Distributed access control information may be security sensitive. Distribution of the access data across the local storage at the manageable entities is cumbersome to track and manage. Embodiments of the invention provide assignment of agents to manageable entities from a central repository, therefore avoiding distributed sensitive information. Depending upon the type of managed entity the agent is adapted to manage, the server retrieves access data from the repository, rather than from a local initialization (.ini) file. Each agent determines which storage elements it can manage. The server correlates the information sent by each agent for each configured managed entity to generate a management correlation. The server then determines a primary agent responsible for managing each of the manageable entities.