Policy-driven fault management in distributed systems

Management policies can be used to specify requirements about the desired behaviour of distributed systems. Violations of policies (faults) can then be detected, isolated, located and corrected using a policy-driven fault management system. Other work in this area to date has focused on network-level faults. We believe that in a distributed system it is more appropriate to focus on faults at the application level. Furthermore, this work has been largely domain-specific-a generic, structured approach to this problem is needed. Our work has focused on policy-driven fault management in distributed systems at the application level. In this paper, we define a generic architecture for policy-driven fault management and present a prototype system based on this architecture. We also discuss experience to date using and experimenting with our prototype system.