A tool to register application configuration remediation methods (17-Nov-2009)
Application errors and failures usually occur when one or more software configuration parameters are missing or have been set with wrong values. Debugging software errors or failures in limited time is very challenging because normally the application configuration consists hundreds of parameters. Resolving software errors or failures is even more difficult because it requires the application administrators to have high degree of application specific knowledge. Less experienced administrators will require long time to resolve the issues and that will result a high or unaffordable cost. To help application administrators quickly determine which configurations are causing the errors, there are several commercial solutions available in the market place. They normally provide a change history for software configuration files and some also provide a difference tool to high light or report the file content changes. However, the solutions provided by those currently available are not complete and do not resolve all difficulties encountered when maintaining application availability. There are several weaknesses need to be addressed. First of all, the skills requirement to application administrators is still high. When application issues arises, he/she will still need to examine the change history manually and it will require application administrators to have enough knowledge to figure out the problematic parameters and have the enough knowledge to determine the correct parameter values. It will also require the administrators to have skills to fix the software configuration problem rapidly. In short, this process is still costly and not time-effective. Secondly, there lacks a unified, best practice solution to resolve the application configuration problems and are totally rely on each application administrator?s own skills. Thirdly, lacking of automated problem resolving mechanism makes the whole remediation process less efficient and not reusable. To resolve the problems just mentioned, a software configuration parameters policy maker is necessary to capture and store the correct (or golden) parameter values as standards. A discovery tool and a compliance engine are also needed to periodically check the software configuration parameters from remote computer systems and report any violations. More importantly, an auto remediation mechanism is needed as the key to quickly fix the problems to dramatically reduce the application downtime. Disclosure titled ?Mechanism of processing Software Configuration Changes and Remediations in a datacenter environment? has invented a software configuration compliance framework to address the end-to-end solution for ensuring golden application configurations for a group of computer systems. This disclosure will further improve the solution by introducing an application configuration remediation register tool to help application remediation developers to easily plug in their application configuration remediation methods into the end-to-end solution. A lot of applications, such as HTTP server, use text-formatted configuration files to config the application. This invention introduces an out-of-box configuration file alteration remediation method to handle the remediation by altering the parameter values in the configuration files. Any applications that are configured using configuration files will just need to be registered using the ?Application Configuration Remediation Registration Tool?. For other non-file-based-config applications, the application specific remediation method will need to be developed and to be registered using this tool. The tool are used to register other remediation options such as application restart option?
A tool to register application configuration remediation methods
Disclosed is a software configuration compliance framework to address the end-to-end solution for ensuring golden application configurations for a group of computer systems.
Application errors and failures typically occur when one or more software configuration parameters are missing or have been set with wrong values. Debugging software errors or failures in a limited time is very challenging because application configurations typically comprise many parameters. Resolving software errors or failures is even more difficult because the resolution requires application administrators to have a high degree of application specific knowledge. Less experienced administrators require a long time to resolve the issues resulting in high or unaffordable costs.
To help application administrators quickly determine which configurations are causing errors, several commercial solutions are available in the market place. The solutions normally provide a change history for software configuration files and some also provide a difference tool to highlight or report file content changes.
However, current solutions are incomplete and do not resolve all difficulties encountered when maintaining application availability. Several weaknesses need to be addressed. First, the skills requirement of application administrators is still high. When application issues arise, the administrator must examine the change history manually and have enough knowledge to determine the problematic parameters and to determine the correct parameter values. The administrators also need to have skills to fix the software configuration problem rapidly. In short, this process is still costly and not time-effective. Second, a unified, best practice solution to resolve the application configuration problems is lacking, and is totally reliant on the skill level of each application administrator. Third, lack of an automated problem resolving mechanism causes the remediation process to be less efficient and not reusable.
To resolve the identified problems, a software configuration parameters policy maker is necessary to capture and store the correct (or golden) parameter values as standards. A discovery tool and a compliance engine are also needed to periodically check the software configuration parameters from remote computer systems and report any violations. More importantly, an auto remediation mechanism is needed as the key to quickly fix the problems and dramatically reduce application downtime. The disclosed framework for processing software configuration changes and remediation in a datacenter environment provides a capability in a software configuration compliance framework to address the end-to-end solution for ensuring golden application configurations for a group of computer systems.
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