Discovering dynamic dependencies in enterprise environments for problem determination

Abstract

In order to reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR) in heterogeneous enterprise environments it should be possible to easily and quickly determine the root cause of a problem detected at a higher level, e.g. through response time violation of a transaction category, and resolve it. Many problem determination applications use a component dependency graph to pinpoint the root cause. However, such graphs are often manually constructed. This paper introduces a simple non-intrusive technique based on mining of existing runtime monitored data, to construct a dynamic dependency graph between the components of an enterprise environment. The graph is traversed to identify nodes that are the cause of response time related problems. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2003.