Put autonomic management in app writers' hands

When you think about autonomic computing today, you generally think about infrastructure-available bandwidth, server load and the like. As such, most vendors target their autonomic management tools at IT operations staff. After all, they run the infrastructure. That's wrong, contends Bruce Olson, vice president of strategy and business development for Optinuity Inc. in Bethesda, Md. He says the best place to monitor for autonomic purposes is at the application level, which is really what your users care about not IT metrics about CPU utilization and packet retransmission rates. That means application writers need to get involved about when, where and how to alert IT when its app is under stress. "This is culturally significant," Olson says, "because the people who know the applications are not the same as those who know the infrastructure." Rachid Sijelmassi, chief technology officer, says developers are much closer to how an app should perform and know what to look for. Today the company is announcing its new Oasis tool that helps the app-dev team to build in autonomic support for their software. Sijelmassi claims the Oasis visual user interface lets developers "create complex effects that are not complex to write." These effects are what Olson calls an "action plan" about, say, how to alert a SANs administrator that an application needs more storage. Olson says because the metrics are created by the app writers themselves, It is likely to get fewer alerts than with traditional systems management tools. Pricing is implementation specific.