Autonomous policy discovery

• US 20070033636A1
• Filed: 08/03/2005
• Published: 02/08/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 08/03/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: SUSE, LLC (SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH)
• Original Assignee: Novell Incorporated (Open Text Corporation)
• Inventors: Ingo, Tambet, Buckley, Martin, Mercado, Jose, Montero-Luque, Carlos
• Granted Patent: US 7,774,822 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 726/1
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0681 Configuration of triggering conditions
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0816 the condition being an adaptation, e.g. in response to network events
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/082 the condition being updates or upgrades of network functionality
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0893 Assignment of logical groups to network elements
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0894 Policy-based network configuration management
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0896 Bandwidth or capacity management, i.e. automatically increasing or decreasing capacities flow or congestion control using dynamic resource allocation, e.g. in-call renegotiation, H04L47/76

Abstract

Techniques for autonomous policy discovery are provided. Machines have personality profiles. The personality profiles permit machines to request advice from different machines having similar personality profiles. This facilitates automatic and autonomous discovery of policies for detected events and facilitates autonomous processing of actions, which are processed in response to the discovered policies. Furthermore, the personality profiles allow administrators to monitor and to dynamically alter policies associated with the machines.

Claims

1. A method, comprising:

detecting an event in a local environment of a first machine;

discovering a policy associated with the event, wherein the policy is discovered by requesting advice of a second machine in response to the event; and

performing one or more actions on the first machine in response to received advice from the second machine.

2. The method of claim 1 further comprising, publishing a personality profile of the first machine.

3. The method of claim 2 further comprising, requesting the advice from the second machine in response to the second machine have a similar personality profile as the personality profile of the first machine.

4. The method of claim 1 further comprising, retaining the advice received from the second machine within an environment of the first machine for future reuse if the event is re-detected on the first machine.

5. The method of claim 4, wherein retaining the advice further includes updating an existing policy to reflect the processing of the one or more actions on the first machine if the event is re-detected.

6. The method of claim 1 further comprising, subsequently receiving the event a second time from a third machine as part of request for new advice from the third machine and communicating the action to the third machine for purposes of allowing the third machine to process the one or more actions.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein detecting the event further includes detecting the event as at least one of a request to upgrade a resource that is received from an administrator, an autonomously detected problem on the first machine associated with the resource, a request to install the resource that is received from the administrator, and an autonomously detected abuse of usage of the resource on the first machine.

8. A method, comprising:

querying a plurality of machines on a network to obtain current personality profiles associated with each of the plurality of machines;

inspecting the current personality profiles for compliance with a standard; and

enabling or disabling one or more policies on one or more of the plurality of machines in response to the inspection.

9. The method of claim 8 further comprising, adjusting weights associated with the one or more policies on one or more of the plurality of machines in response to the inspection.

10. The method of claim 8 further comprising, pushing one or more new policies to one or more of the plurality of machines in response to the inspection.

11. The method of claim 8 further comprising, selectively grouping select ones of the plurality of machines in response to their personality profiles.

12. The method of claim 11 wherein enabling or disabling further includes determining select ones of the one or more policies to enable or disable in response to the select groupings.

13. The method of claim 8 further comprising, processing the method dynamically and automatically.

14. The method of claim 8 further comprising, issuing one or more warnings to one or more of the plurality of machines in response to the inspection.

15. A system, comprising:

a personality profile associated with a machine; and

a policy service to process on the machine, wherein the policy service is to detect events on the machine and discover policies related to the events and to query other machines for assistance that have a similar personality profile and to process actions in response to the discovered policies or in response to advice received from the other machines.

16. The system of claim 15, wherein the policy service is to further update one or more of the discovered policies in response to advice received from the other machines.

17. The system of claim 15, wherein the policy service is to further provide its own advice to a number of the other machines if subsequently queried with respect to one or more of the events.

18. The system of claim 15, wherein the policy service is to further deploy a weighting scheme for the discovered policies to determine the actions to process on the machine.

19. The system of claim 18, wherein the policy service is to further adjust the weighting scheme in response to the advice received from the other machines.

20. A system, comprising

a machine interface;

and

an administrator interface, wherein the administrator interface is to interact with the machine interface to communicate with a plurality of machines to identify current personality profiles for each of the machines, and wherein the administrator interface is to interact with a standards service to ensure each of the machines comply with a standard, and the administrator interface is to further interact with the machine interface to adjust or install one or more policies on one or more of the machines in response to ensuring that each of the machines comply with the standard.

21. The system of claim 20, wherein the administrator interface is to further adjust weights on one or more of the machines for one or more of the policies in response to ensuring that each of the machines comply with the standard.

22. The system of claim 20, wherein the one or more policies relate to usage of a resource residing within environments of the one or more machines.

23. The system of claim 22, wherein the resource is at least one of a service and a device.

24. The system of claim 20, wherein the administrator interface is at least one of an automated service or an automated service having a variety of manually directed operations.