Storing dependency and status information with incidents

• US 7,716,327 B2
• Filed: 05/15/2007
• Issued: 05/11/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 05/15/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: SAP SE
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Parzygnat, Kenneth J., Coley, Brett A., Riley, Wayne B., Joshi, Niraj P.
• Primary Examiner(s): Nguyen; Quang N.
• Assistant Examiner(s): THAI, NAM N
• Application Number:
  US11/748,602
• Publication Number:
  US 20080288502A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,092 Days
• Field of Search: 709/243, 709/244, 702/186
• US Class Current: 709/224
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0709 in a distributed system consisting of a plurality of standalone computer nodes, e.g. clusters, client-server systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0748 in a remote unit communicating with a single-box computer node experiencing an error/fault remote testing G06F11/2294
• 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 and system are disclosed for reporting incidents occurring during operation of a distributed computing environment including a multitude of hardware and software resources. The method comprises the steps of whenever a defined incident occurs, generating a respective one incident report; and keeping with each incident report, selected information relating to the incident. Preferably, this information that is kept with the incident report identifies (i) selected resources associated with the defined incident, and status of said selected resources at the time of the defined incident, (ii) dependencies among said selected resources at the time of the defined incident, and (iii) service level agreements and operating level agreements impacted by the defined incident.

Claims

1. A method of reporting incidents occurring during operation of a distributed computing environment including a multitude of hardware and software resources, and wherein said distributed environment provides a multitude of services to a multitude of clients pursuant to service level agreements and operating level agreements, and wherein during operation of the distributed computing environment defined incidents occur, the method comprising the steps of:

whenever one of the defined incidents occur, generating a respective one incident report;

keeping with each incident report, information identifying selected resources associated with said one of the defined incidents, and status of said selected resources at the time of said one of the defined incidents, dependencies among said selected resources at the time of said one of the defined incidents, and service level agreements and operating level agreements impacted by said one of the defined incidents;

using relationships between incidents and resources, as reported on the incident reports, to find patterns of repeating failure of resources of the distributed computing environment; and

using said relationships between the incidents and resources, as reported on the incident reports, to identify sets of resources similar to the resources reported on the incident reports but not on the incident reports, that may be susceptible to problems;

wherein said relationships between the incidents and resources and said hardware and software resources represent

a. Report Failing Component dependencies,

b. Candidate Failing Component dependencies,

c. Actual Failing Component dependencies,

d. Impacted Business system dependencies, and

e. Impacted Service Level Agreement dependencies;

said Impacted Service Level Agreement dependencies are derived from the Actual Failing Component dependencies.

2. The method according to claim 1, wherein the keeping step includes the step of identifying on said each incident report:

reported failing components;

candidate failing components;

actual failing components; and

impacted business systems.

3. The method according to claim 2, comprising the further step of displaying said incident reports on a computer monitor.