International Business Machines Corporation

Tim A McConnell

Michael D Swanson

Mythili K Bobak

Chun-Shi Chang

Brian Owen Wood

David Vincent Bostjancic

Management of an Information Technology environment is facilitated by preparing the environment for management. The environment is prepared for a specific management goal, such as an availability goal or a performance goal. To prepare the environment, one or more recommended preparatory actions are selected, initiated and monitored. Resources associated with the actions are also monitored.

Dynamic selection of actions in an information technology environment

The projected effect of executing a proposed action on the computing environment is determined. Based on the projected effect, programmatic enforcement of whether the action is allowed to execute or not is provided. The action is selected based on the current status of the environment.

Projecting an effect, using a pairing construct, of execution of a proposed action on a computing environment

A change to a goal specified for an IT environment is to be made. Responsive to the changed goal, the IT environment is changed. This change is performed non-disruptively. Further, during the change, management to the existing goal is continued.

Non-disruptively changing a computing environment

Recovery processing is defined that matches the scope of an outage. A programmatic analysis of the resources that have been impacted, of implications of the failure and what degradations have occurred is performed to construct an appropriate level of recovery. This includes selecting the appropriate set of resources to be recovered. Recovery operations are selected based on the current state of the environment.

Defining a computer recovery process that matches the scope of outage including determining a root cause and performing escalated recovery operations

Real-time data of business applications of an Information Technology environment is monitored to obtain information to be used in managing the environment. A business application includes processing collectively performed by a plurality of components of the environment. A component includes one or more resources, and therefore, in one example, the real-time data being monitored is associated with those resources.

Real-time information technology environments

Workflows to be used in managing a computing environment are dynamically and programmatically created and/or activities are invoked, based on the current state of the environment. In creating a workflow, activities are conditionally included in the workflow based on the state of the environment. Different types of workflows may be created.

Dynamic generation of processes in computing environments

Templates are provided and used in an Information Technology (IT) environment. A template represents a pattern of resources and resource relationships of the IT environment. Templates are applied to automatically generate recommendations of programmatic representations of artifacts of the IT environment. The artifacts include Recovery Segments, Redundancy Groups, Business Resilience Manager deployment configurations and/or resource pairing represented by relationship data stores, as examples.

Defining and using templates in configuring information technology environments

Management of a customer's IT environment is facilitated by correlating events that occur within the environment, obtaining information relating to those events, and performing actions, such as environment tuning or recovery actions, based on the information. Discrete phases of processing are used to obtain the information and/or perform the actions. One or more of these discrete processing phases have tunable time intervals associated therewith. That is, at least one time interval is dynamically adjusted based on the runtime state of the environment.

Information technology management based on computer dynamically adjusted discrete phases of event correlation

The scope and impact of an event, such as a failure, are identified. A Containment Region is used to identify the resources affected by the event. It is also used to aggregate resource state for those resources. This information is then used to manage one or more aspects of a customer's environment. This management may include recovery from a failure.

Management of runtime events in a computer environment using a containment region

Programmatically adapting an Information Technology (IT) environment to changes associated with business applications of the IT environment. The programmatically adapting is performed in the context of the business application. The changes can reflect changes in the IT environment, changes to the business application, changes to the business environment and/or failures within the environment, as examples.

Adaptive business resiliency computer system for information technology environments

A Pattern System Environment is formed. The Pattern System Environment is a representation of information technology (IT) resources of a customer's business environment. The Pattern System Environment is based on information associated with the IT resources of the customer, and that information indicates how the IT resources are utilized during a business cycle of the customer. Pattern System Environments are usable in many environments, including those that support business resiliency.

Facilitating availability of information technology resources based on pattern system environments

Processes are programmatically categorized into a plurality of categories, which are prioritized. Serialization is used to control execution of the processes of the various categories. The serialization ensures that processes of higher priority categories are given priority in execution. This includes temporarily preventing processes of lower priority categories from being executed.

Preventing execution of processes responsive to changes in the environment

Management of an Information Technology (IT) environment is conditionally controlled based on runtime analysis of resource pairing constructs. Resource pairings are provided, and evaluated based on the current state of the environment. This real-time information is then used in performing managerial tasks, the results of which are effected by the runtime conditions.

Conditional computer runtime control of an information technology environment based on pairing constructs

Recovery Segments are defined and employed to facilitate management of a customer's environment. A Recovery Segment is a runtime usable representation of resources and relationships between those resources associated with a business application. That representation is usable in managing the business application. Associated with the representation is one or more goals to be met by resources of the representation.

Recovery segments for computer business applications

Programmatically validating service level policies established for business applications of an Information Technology environment. The programmatic validation predicts whether the policies are achievable within the environment. Examples of service level policies include quantitative goals, redundancy levels and resource use.

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Tim A McConnell