A search engine for systems management

Abstract

This paper describes a search facility for systems management that was designed and implemented to simplify the management of large IT infrastructures. As the complexity of data centers or telecommunication networks increases, managing such infrastructures involves large amounts of data originating from many and diverse sources. In a typical IT management infrastructure, we find many management components such as commercial and open source products (e.g., for monitoring); custom, be-spoke software (e.g., a home-grown inventory database) as well as additional conventional (e.g., calendar) and unconventional (e.g., Web forums, blogs) data sources. The amount of information and the number of tools that are at the disposal of the system operator for management tasks are both wide-ranging and overwhelming. Finding the set of information and tools that is relevant to solve a given problem is a challenge, and typically requires expertise in how to extract data from the available data sources and how to use that extracted data effectively. A search facility that can locate data and tools is beneficial to systems management, but to maximize its impact, it needs to address the heterogeneity of data and data sources; provide task-focused, structured and enriched results, and be both scalable and cost-effective in the dynamic and changing environment of today's IT infrastructures. This paper describes such a system, called Fusio, that provides a search capability based on a loose coupling of heterogeneous, systems-management-related data in an IT environment. Fusio is based on the Semantic Web and traditional information-retrieval technologies. Tools such as Fusio are useful for system operators in carrying out tasks, such as problem resolution, where pointers to related information and tools can be quickly found to speed up the task. They are also useful for training purposes, e.g., as a reference to available data and tools. The paper describes the architecture of the search facility and the prototype implementation that is now being deployed in a test environment.