Speaker: Maayan Goldstein 

Title: On Performance Management and Self Healing 

Abstract:

Performance management is concerned with guaranteeing that a managed
system meets its pre-set performance goals, as specified in Service
Level Objectives (SLOs).  Performance management is commonly
implemented via component-level thresholds on performance metrics.
Violations of these thresholds are used for detecting a
component-level anomaly, which is considered indicative of
system-level health. A key problem in performance management is the
discovery of the normal value ranges of component metrics, and the
setting of thresholds thereof, such that their violation indicates a
system-level SLO breach.
 
The Automated Threshold Setting (ATS) project provides an automated
and adaptive solution to the problem of setting meaningful thresholds
on component level metrics such that their violation is statistically
indicative of system-level SLO breaches. It also controls the average
rate of false alarms, thus improving the efficacy of threshold-based
performance management.

 
SHADOWS (Self-Healing Approach to Designing Complex Software Systems)
is a three-year EU STREP project.
Self-healing capabilities allow software systems to overcome problems
occurring during testing and run time, and thus improve
overall system behavior. We have reported on an initial
implementation of PANACEA framework that provides a design
methodology as well as ready-to-use healing elements aimed at
enhancing software systems with self-healing capabilities.  The
framework is based on inserting annotations into the system code at
design and coding time, to later on serve as an interface for runtime
monitoring, managing, configuring and healing of the annotated system
components. As our initial experiments demonstrate, PANACEA
introduces a very small performance overhead, and scales well.

These are two of the activities of Maayan's
research group in IBM Haifa Research Labs: ATS and SHADOWS
Web site: http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/dept/stt/sspm.html