History-based prioritizing of suspected components

• US 7,409,595 B2
• Filed: 01/18/2005
• Issued: 08/05/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 01/18/2005
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Zlotnick, Aviad, Nissan-Messing, Orit
• Primary Examiner(s): Chu; Gabriel L
• Application Number:
  US11/037,513
• Publication Number:
  US 20060161819A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,295 Days
• Field of Search: None
• US Class Current: 714/26
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/079 Root cause analysis, i.e. error or fault diagnosis in a hardware test environment G06F11/22; in a software test environment G06F11/36
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0793 Remedial or corrective actions recovery from an exception in an instruction pipeline G06F9/3861; by retry G06F11/1402; for recovering from a failure of a protocol instance or entity H04L69/40
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/2294 by remote test

Abstract

A method for servicing a computerized system includes detecting a failure of a given type in the computerized system, and generating a list of corrective actions in response to the failure, using an automated maintenance program. A record of one or more previous failures of the given type in the computerized system is retrieved, indicating at least one previous corrective action taken in response to the previous failures. The method prioritizes the list of corrective actions responsively to the record, using the automated maintenance program, so as to adjust a priority of the at least one previous corrective action in the list. The prioritized list from the automated maintenance program is provided to a repair function for use in servicing the computerized system.

Claims

1. A method for servicing a computerized system, comprising:

detecting a failure of a given type in the computerized system;

generating a list of corrective actions in response to the failure, using an automated maintenance program;

retrieving a record of one or more previous failures of the given type in the computerized system, and indicating previous corrective actions and times at which the previous corrective actions were taken in response to the previous failures, including at least a first corrective action taken at a first time and a second corrective action taken at a second time, more recent than the first time;

prioritizing the list of corrective actions responsively to the times at which the previous corrective actions were taken, using the automated maintenance program, so as to reduce a priority of the second corrective action, which was taken at the more recent time, relative to the first corrective action; and

providing the prioritized list from the automated maintenance program to a repair function for use in servicing the computerized system.

2. The method according to claim 1, wherein the computerized system comprises a data storage system.

3. The method according to claim 1, wherein detecting the failure comprises receiving an automatic failure alert.

4. The method according to claim 1, wherein wherein prioritizing the list comprises ordering the list responsively to the times at which the previous corrective actions were taken.

5. The method according to claim 4, wherein ordering the list comprises determining a most-recently-performed action, and moving the most-recently-performed action to the end of the list.

6. The method according to claim 4, wherein ordering the list comprises reordering the list in ascending order of the times at which the previous corrective actions were taken.

7. The method according to claim 4, wherein ordering the list comprises determining the priority of the second corrective action responsively to a measure of probability of the previous failures.

8. The method according to claim 7, wherein the second corrective action was performed on a component of the computerized system, and wherein determining the priority of the second corrective action comprises comparing the second time to a mean time between failures (MTBF) of the component.

9. The method according to claim 4, wherein the second corrective action was performed on a component of the computerized system, and wherein ordering the list comprises determining whether to reduce the priority of the second corrective action by comparing the second time to a characteristic failure time of the component.

10. The method according to claim 1, wherein generating the list of corrective actions comprises listing one or more suspected components to be replaced by the repair function.

11. The method according to claim 10, and comprising automatically detecting the components replaced by the repair function so as to generate the record.

12. The method according to claim 1, wherein providing the prioritized list comprises presenting the prioritized list to a repair person.