Wednesday, 20 September 2006

IBM Develops Self-Healing Software to Speed IT Troubleshooting

IBM has released new software that helps developers write applications with the ability to self-determine problems. Created through the collaboration of IBM research and development laboratories in India, Japan, Toronto and the United States, the software helps recognise 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 customised 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.

The toolkit is based on the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management Event Format (WSDM WEF) industry standard. In addition to making technology easier to manage, WSDM helps companies build out service oriented architecture, or SOA, which is a way of reusing a company's existing technology to more closely align with business goals.