Distributed Systems Management Software-in-the-Loop

Abstract

IT experts expect open distributed processing to become the predominant computing infrastructure in the late nineties. All computer supported work places of large enterprises and organizations will then be networked and will be integrated into cross-regional and cross-sector business and information processes. The size and complexity of such applications, the local autonomy, distribution and heterogeneity of participating subsystems, and their asynchronous interaction, however, require new architectures, strategies, and tools for their technical management. In previous work we placed a production rule interpreter into the monitoring, decision, control action loop to provide flexible, operational semantics of well-understood management policies. In this article we extend this work in two directions. First we map the structure and dynamic behavior of policies into a graph representation. This semantic representation enables a systematic prediction of the effects of policy executions and allows for a better impact analysis in case of policy changes. Then we introduce a declarative event definition mechanism. It supports a causal and temporal correlation of individual events and serves to instantiate and adapt a predefined generic event handler to the specific needs of the actual management application. Such event handlers join in the interaction between monitoring agents and policy interpreter. By event correlation they may reduce the number of events triggering management actions significantly and help to filter secondary events.