METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR ROOT CAUSE IDENTIFICATION AND PROBLEM DETERMINATION IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

摘要

A technique for determining a root cause of a condition (e.g., service outage)of at least one subject component in a computing environment comprises thefollowing steps/operations. First, one or more components in the computingenvironment upon which the at least one subject component depends (e.g.,antecedents) are identified. Identification comprises traversing at least aportion of a model representative of an existence of one or more relationshipsassociated with at least a portion of components of the computing environmentand which is capable of accounting for a full lifecycle (e.g., includingdeployment, installation and runtime) associated with at least one componentof the computing environment. Then, one or more procedures are performed inaccordance with the one or more identified components to determine a conditionstatus associated with each of the one or more identified components. By wayof example, the inventive techniques may be applied to a distributed computingenvironment. The computing environment may also be an autonomic computingenvironment.