You invest a lot of time, energy and cost in managing systems, dealing with problem determination, and debugging activities—those things that are very real and very immediate. In addition, there's the business impact of downtime as you're dealing with a problem that's delaying your operation. But still, you have to assume that systems will fail, there will be problems. Every vendor strives to deliver defect-free products. But, the numbers of combinations of use and unique vendor products is almost uncountable. It's an infinite number of possibilities in today's open systems heterogeneous world. So, rather than attempt to solve the problems by trying to make everything perfect, solve the problem by making everything more manageable, more debuggable, and speed up the process of figuring out where the problem is. You may have implemented monitoring solutions that help identify a failure that's occurring and automate recovery. In some cases, you recover and everything goes back to normal. In other cases, the blame game begins. Either way, once service is restored, you're faced with one fundamental question: How do I isolate what caused the problem, so it never happens again. Unfortunately, Problem Determination is typically a highly manual process based on a siloed approach. Almost all applications and hardware devices generate log files which capture information about what's going on within that component. And each vendor typically uses different log file formats to report on the health of their device or application. Even products from the same vendor may use different log file formats due to vendor acquisitions. To complicate matters, you have different product experts--all using different tools to isolate the cause of a failure.
IBM has products that can help you significantly reduce Problem Determination time. By embedding Problem Determination capabilities into IBM products, we help you quickly and consistently isolate the root cause of problems in multi-vendor heterogenous environments. Our Problem Determination capabilities leverage industry-standard log formats such as the OASIS-established WSDM WEF to simplify root cause analysis and can help save you time and money.
The Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) standard provides the foundation for enabling the use of Web services technology to manage distributed IT resources, offering one set of instrumentation to manage resources to address the problem of management integration.
The Generic Log Adapter converts existing log files to the Common Base Event format. This component helps software developers adapt their applications to the common format without the need to re-write the applications.
The IBM Autonomic Log and Trace Analyzer supports reading logs in the Common Base Event format, correlating the logs based on different criteria and viewing the correlated log records -- enabling faster root cause analysis and problem determination in the end-to-end heterogeneous environment.
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