PROGRAMMATIC VALIDATION IN AN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ENVIRONMENT

• US 20090172769A1
• Filed: 12/28/2007
• Published: 07/02/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 12/28/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Swanson, Michael D., Chang, Chun-Shi, Bobak, Mythili K., McConnell, Tim A.
• Granted Patent: US 8,326,910 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 726/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/06 Resources, workflows, human or project management; Enterprise or organisation planning; Enterprise or organisation modelling
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0843 based on generic templates
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/5003 Managing SLA; Interaction between SLA and QoS
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/5012 determining service availability, e.g. which services are available at a certain point in time
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 69/40 for recovering from a failure of a protocol instance or entity, e.g. service redundancy protocols, protocol state redundancy or protocol service redirection management of faults, events, alarms or notifications in data switching networks H04L41/06

Abstract

Programmatically validating service level policies established for business applications of an Information Technology environment. The programmatic validation predicts whether the policies are achievable within the environment. Examples of service level policies include quantitative goals, redundancy levels and resource use.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented validation method comprising:

obtaining a service level policy to be validated for an information technology environment; and

programmatically validating the service level policy for achievability, wherein the programmatically validating predicts whether the service level policy is achievable.

2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the service level policy comprises a quantitative availability goal.

3. The computer-implemented method of claim 2, wherein the availability goal comprises a recovery time objective specified for a component of the information technology environment.

4. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the service level policy is associated with a business application.

5. The computer-implemented method of claim 4, wherein the programmatically validating uses relationships between resources of the business application to validate the service level policy.

6. The computer-implemented method of claim 4, wherein the programmatically validating creates a set of operations which alter one or more capabilities of one or more resources supporting the business application, and wherein individual operations included in the set of operations are selected to optimally achieve an overall time period for performing a specified action for the business application.

7. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, further comprising creating a representation of a sequence of operations for the programmatically validated service level policy.

8. The computer-implemented method of claim 7, wherein the representation comprises a Gantt representation.

9. The computer-implemented method of claim 8, wherein the Gantt representation is created prior to a failure for which one or more operations expressed in the Gantt representation are used in recovery of the failure.

10. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the programmatically validating uses at least one of observed historical data or explicit specification of data values to validate the service level policy.

11. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, further comprising:

automatically detecting a change in the information technology environment; and

performing re-validation of the service level policy, in response to detecting the change.

12. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the programmatically validating comprises validating a plurality of service level policies.

13. A validation system comprising:

a memory comprising a service level policy to be validated for an information technology environment; and

at least one processor to programmatically validate the service level policy for achievability, wherein the programmatically validating predicts whether the service level policy is achievable.

14. The system of claim 13, wherein the service level policy comprises a quantitative availability goal.

15. The system of claim 13, wherein one or more operations to be performed to achieve the programmatically validated service level policy are represented in a Gantt representation.

16. The system of claim 13, wherein the programmatically validating uses at least one of observed historical data or explicit specification of data values to validate the service level policy.

17. An article of manufacture comprising:

at least one computer usable medium having computer readable program code logic to validate, said computer readable program code logic when executing performing the following;

obtaining a service level policy to be validated for an information technology environment; and

programmatically validating the service level policy for achievability, wherein the programmatically validating predicts whether the service level policy is achievable.

18. The article of manufacture of claim 17, wherein the service level policy comprises a quantitative availability goal.

19. The article of manufacture of claim 17, further comprising creating a representation of a sequence of operations for the programmatically validated service level policy.

20. The article of manufacture of claim 17, further comprising:

automatically detecting a change in the information technology environment; and

performing re-validation of the service level policy, in response to detecting the change.