An Introduction to Autonomic Policy Management

What is Autonomic Policy Management?
Autonomic Policy Management (APM) is a radically new approach to dealing with IT complexity, and it is fundamentally changing the way enterprises manage the heterogeneous and distributed nature of business systems and applications.

Autonomic Policy Management is about moving from a mode of IT management that is reactive and manual to one that is proactive and requires no human intervention.  This is achieved by attacking the IT complexity problem from a business application perspective rather than an infrastructure component perspective.  Autonomic Policy Management is about using automation to make complex business systems self-configuring, self-healing and self optimizing – in essence, self-managing.

How Does Autonomic Policy Management Work?
In order to understand how Autonomic Policy Management works, let’s first look at the traditional method for managing IT. The current management model is based on the premise that IT operations staff executes prescribed procedures in response to operational incidents. The operations staff relies on expensive monitoring tools (and often-impacted users) for notification that an incident exists.  By definition, this model is reactive.  A service ticket is created and assigned to a technical expert, who typically resolves the incident after further diagnostic and resolution steps.  In some cases, these end-to-end “ticket lifecycles” are governed by best practices guidelines such as ITIL; in other cases they are ad hoc.  Sometimes, enterprises have automated various parts of this ticket lifecycle.  We refer to this as “downstream” automation, because it is simply automating reactive processes that take place well after the incident occurs.

In contrast, Autonomic Policy Management enables enterprises to tackle the business system problem proactively, or “upstream,” at the application layer.  Upstream management is accomplished by embedding closed-loop automated processes – or Autonomic Policies – at the application infrastructure level rather than in the systems management infrastructure. 

These upstream Autonomic Policies provide enterprises with a practical way to achieve self-managing systems without requiring complex integrations with a myriad of point management tools.  Autonomic Policy Management is inherently proactive because it deals with problems before the end-user is affected.  In essence, rather than viewing recurring business system issues and problems as abnormal, requiring monitoring and human intervention to correct, Autonomic Policy Management, or APM, views these issues as normal occurrences and embeds self-correcting and self-adjusting processes within the business system itself.

Optinuity Makes Autonomic Policy Management Possible
Optinuity Oasis™ is a revolutionary approach to managing IT and has made self-managing systems and applications a reality. 

Oasis is the only product to combine elements of policy management, adaptive monitoring, run book automation and enterprise job scheduling into a seamless software solution.  This combination makes Optinuity Oasis uniquely suited for implementing Autonomic Policy Management. Not only do Autonomic Policies implemented with Oasis detect impending problems, but the solution actually makes real-time adjustments and corrections to ensure that issues have no meaningful impact on end-users and require no human intervention to resolve.