Autonomic fault isolation in a highly interconnected system

Abstract

A method and apparatus provides fault isolation in a in a highly interconnected system. A fault isolator uses a virtual topology of the system to autonomically isolate the fault. Failing nodes interconnects are identified and then used to traverse a virtual topology to determine the most suspect components as the cause of the reported failures. A failure indication is propagated to each component connected to a failing node in the virtual topology until the next node in the virtual topology is encountered. In preferred embodiments, the failure indications for each component are tallied together as the topology is traversed for each failing node and/or component. A total count of the number of nodes connected to each component is determined for a denominator. A weighting of the likelihood of fault is then determined by dividing the failure indications by the total count.