The tool in question, awkwardly named The Build to Manage Toolkit for Problem Determination, was developed at IBM’s autonomic computing research center in Yamato, Japan in conjunction with its customer Toshiba. An Eclipse plug-in, the toolkit is being designed to provide a catalog of event pattern signatures, plus a software development kit for adding new signatures to the catalog.
In other words, if there are familiar patterns of system events that occur before an outage or slowdown, why not catalog them for quick reference?
Development of the tool is an attempt by IBM to prod the web services standards community to take the next step. Currently, the community is in the midst of defining reconciled standards for reporting system events via web services messages.
Specifically, it represents a coming together brokered by HP of the Microsoft and DMTF-based WS-Management proposal with the IBM, BMC, and CA-based WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management) format approved by Oasis. The group still has several drafts ahead of it to hash out converged formats before finalizing a new proposal.
So assuming that a common event format is hammered out, IBM wants the web services community to get around to standardizing how you report patterns of events.
IBM claims that its move to introduce technology ahead of talk of any standards is not an attempt to preempt up the market with a de facto standard.
If you have actual code that can show the value, it’s a lot better than just showing them an abstract specification, said Ric Telford, vice president of autonomic computing. We just want people to understand the concept.
It’s obviously too early to report the beginnings of any standards activity. IBM’s goal is to get the discussion to start. It plans to release the toolkit as an Eclipse plug in sometime this quarter.
