Method and system for managing computer systems

• US 20070094212A1
• Filed: 10/23/2006
• Published: 04/26/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 04/10/2002
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Instasolv Incorporated
• Original Assignee: Instasolv Incorporated
• Inventors: Sokolov, Stepan, Das, Saumitra, Chiu, Bill 'Yuan-Chi'
• Granted Patent: US 7,707,133 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 706/50
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3604 Software analysis for verifying properties of programs byte-code verification G06F9/44589
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/3612 by runtime analysis performance monitoring G06F11/3466
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 5/00 Computing arrangements using knowledge-based models
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 5/025 Extracting rules from data
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 5/043 Distributed expert systems; Blackboards
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 5/046 Forward inferencing; Production systems
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0213 Standardised network management protocols, e.g. simple network management protocol [SNMP]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/046 comprising network management agents or mobile agents therefor
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0631 using root cause analysis; using analysis of correlation between notifications, alarms or events based on decision criteria, e.g. hierarchy, tree or time analysis
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/16 using machine learning or artificial intelligence
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/22 comprising specially adapted graphical user interfaces [GUI]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/0817 by checking functioning

Abstract

A management system for a computer system is disclosed. The computer system operates or includes various products (e.g., software products) that can be managed in a management system or collectively by a group of management systems. Typically, the management system operates on a computer separate from the computer system being managed. The management system can make use of a knowledge base of causing symptoms for previously observed problems at other sites or computer systems. In other words, the knowledge base can built from and shared by different users across different products to leverage knowledge that is otherwise disparate. The knowledge base typically grows over time. The management system can use its ability to request information from the computer system being managed together with the knowledge base to infer a problem root cause in the computer system being managed. The computer system being managed can also request the management system to process its knowledge base for possible problem cause analysis. The management system can also continually identify persisting problem causing symptoms.

Claims

1. A management system for at least one computer system, comprising:

a plurality of agents residing within managed nodes of a plurality of different products used within the computer system; and

a manager for said management system, said manager being operable across the different products,

wherein said management system further comprises a knowledge base,

wherein said knowledge base contains information pertaining to the different products,

wherein the information pertaining to the different products includes at least rules,

wherein a plurality of different users across multiple organizations contribute to the information within said knowledge base, the information contributed by the users being integrated into the knowledge base in an automated manner.

2. A management system as recited in claim 1, wherein the different products are software products.

3. A management system as recited in claim 2, wherein said knowledge base is shared and used by a plurality of different organizations to manage their computer systems, the different organizations having the same or different product configurations on their computer systems.

4. A management system as recited in claim 2, wherein said knowledge base is updated by contributions from other users, and an update to said knowledge base is distributed to said manager via the Internet.

5. A management system as recited in claim 2, wherein the rules include rules specific to root-cause analysis.

6. A management system as recited in claim 5, wherein said manager further comprises an inference engine that evaluate the rules.

7. A method for managing an enterprise computer system, said method comprising:

receiving a fact pertaining to a condition of one of a plurality of different software products that are operating in the enterprise computer system;

asserting the fact with respect to an inference engine, the inference engine using rules based on facts;

retrieving updated facts from the inference engine from those of the rules that are dependent on the fact that has been asserted; and

performing an action in view of the updated facts.

8. A method as recited in claim 7, wherein the action includes a debug data acquisition.

9. A method as recited in claim 8, wherein the debug action further asserts at least one fact with respect to the inference engine.

10. A method as recited in claim 7, wherein the inference engine obtains resource information from the different products to process rules based on at least one fact already asserted.

11. A method as recited in claim 7, wherein the different software products send resource information to the inference engine to process rules that depend on at least one fact representing the resource information.

12. A method for isolating a root cause of a software problem in an enterprise computer system supporting a plurality of software products, said method comprising:

forming a knowledge base from causing symptoms and experienced problems provided by a disparate group of personal contributors; and

examining the knowledge base with respect to the software problem to isolate the cause of the software problem to one of the software products.

13. A method as recited in claim 12, wherein the knowledge base further includes corrective actions for certain software problems.

14. A method as recited in claim 13, wherein said method further comprises:

automatically performing a correction operation to attempt correction of the software problem, the correction operation being associated with one of the corrective actions within the knowledge base that is suitable for use with the software problem.

15. A method as recited in claim 13, wherein the causing symptoms pertain to resources of the software products.

16. A method as recited in claim 12, wherein a repeating symptom cause can be ignored until after the cause ceases to exist at least once.