Title: Automated Service-Oriented Impact Analysis and Recovery Alternative Selection
Author: David Schmitz
e-mail: schmitzb _at_ nm.ifi.lmu.de
Partner: LMU
Supervisor: Heinz-Gerd Hegering
Committee: Gabi Dreo Rodosek (UniBwM)
Year of start: 2004
Year of end: 2008
Funding institution: Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität München

The realization of today’s IT services are often very complex and depending on a lot of used resources. In the event of a failure or degradation of one or multiple of such resources there are two critical aspects: the impact analysis, that is the analysis of the impact on the dependent services, as well as the corresponding recovery of these services.

Concerning the recovery, for instance the selection of the resource to be fixed first, the estimation of the necessary effort, and the response time are very important.

In this thesis a framework for the impact analysis of currently occurring or only assumed resource degradations on the provider’s services is developed. This comprises impact on the functionality of the services, the quality of service (QoS), the particular customers and service level agreements (SLAs), as well as impact on the provider’s business by, e.g, SLA violation costs, revenue loss, or further related influences on finances or reputation.

Moreover, the framework includes an analysis and decision support for the selection of appropriate recovery measures for a fast and efficient, partial or complete compensation of the given resource degradations.

At last, the support for tracking actually realized recovery measures is treated in order to allow the consolidation with potentially performed IT changes as well as the notification of affected customers.

Each of the above mentioned parts of the developed framework includes a treatment of the involved workflows, a correspondingly comprehensive and integrated data modeling, as well as the application to concrete IT service scenarios.

See http://www.mnm-team.org/~schmitzb/