New self-healing software diagnoses IT problems based on symptoms

IBM has announced the launch of new software that helps developers and solution providers build self-healing capabilities into their applications - features that could save IT staff up to 80 percent of time previously spent resolving issues manually, says IBM.

Created through the collaboration of IBM research and development laboratories in India, Japan, Toronto and the United States, the software helps recognize warning signs to head off system crashes and performance bottlenecks.

The new software, which is based on open industry standards, helps developers capture and pinpoint the root cause of problems - allowing them to create a customized catalog of problem symptoms so they can be fixed based on historical knowledge. This symptoms catalog is essentially an automated ‘cheat-sheet’ that operations staff can use if these problems come up when deploying and running the application, saving time and money. Additional symptoms and solutions can be added as new knowledge on the causes of problems is learned, continuously making the catalog more far-reaching and useful.

Today, a glitch in one IT component can trigger dozens of other errors, causing a domino effect that compounds the problem. The task of troubleshooting problems can take teams of IT specialists hours or even days to manually review error logs to trace problems, step-by-step, back to the point of failure. In fact, IT analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates estimates that determining the cause of a problem can take 50 to 80 percent of an IT staff's time, while 15 to 20 percent of their time is spent repairing it.

The software is part of the IBM ‘Build to Manage Toolkit for Problem Determination’, which also contains tools, tutorials and support to help developers quickly build problem determination management capabilities into their applications, without being management experts. Problem determination components found in the toolkit are drawn from IBM's Tivoli, WebSphere and Rational software portfolios.

According to Dr. Kazuo Iwano, vice president, IBM Software Laboratory in Yamato, Japan, "With core technology in place, we are now in autonomic computing's second stage - targeting for IT process efficiency, particularly around making systems management. This autonomic technology allows us to envision a day within a few short years when all IT problems are resolved in a fraction of the time it takes today. This has the potential to unleash enormous productivity gains from such a dramatic decrease in downtime."

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/eclipse/btm

•Date: 21st Sept 2006• Region: World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
Rate this article or make a comment - click here