Discovering Dynamic Dependencies in Enterprise environment for Problem Determination

Typical e-business environments are a heterogeneous collection of hardware and software components. Even after years of research focus on reduction of mean time to failure (MTTF), relatively frequent failures have been an unavoidable fact in most complex operational systems. Taking this into account, recently there has been great deal of attention on reduction of system mean time to recovery (MTTR), once failures are detected. In order to reduce MTTR, 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 monitor 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.