An analysis method for the improvement of reliability and performance in policy-based management systems

Abstract

Policy-based management shows good promise for application to semiautomated distributed systems management. It is extremely difficult, however, to create policies for controlling the behavior of managed distributed systems that are sufficiently accurate to ensure good reliability. Further, when policy-based management technology is to be applied to actual systems, performance, in addition to reliability, also becomes an important consideration. In this paper, we propose a static analysis method for improving both the reliability and the performance of policy-based management systems. With this method, all sets of policies whose actions might possibly access the same target entity simultaneously are detected. Such sets of policies could cause unexpected trouble in managed systems if their policies were to be executed concurrently. Additionally the results of the static analysis can be used in the optimization of policy processing, and we have developed an experimental system for such optimization. The results of experimental use of this system show that an optimized system is as much as 1.47 times faster than a non-optimized system. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2004.