Oasis: Creating Autonomic Policies

Oasis Policy Creation Environment
The Oasis™ Policy Creation environment provides a highly intuitive and flexible authoring tool for creating sophisticated Autonomic Policies. A drag-and-drop graphical user interface and rich set of modular programming constructs allow for rapid development of sophisticated policies that support all levels of complexity.

An Autonomic Policy is an automated representation of a closed-loop condition-response process. Autonomic Policies deployed with Oasis are comprised of a combination of State Policies (state condition), Schedule Policies (time condition) and ActionPlans (response). Similarly, three distinct toolsets comprise the Oasis Policy Creation environment. These toolsets are the primary interface for developing and deploying specific categories of autonomic functionality.

The toolsets are:

State Policy Builder
Intuitive graphical environment for defining sophisticated condition-response mechanisms that drive autonomic management. Declarative policies allow natural language definitions without requiring complex configuration of the underlying technology.

ActionPlan Builder
Rich graphical authoring environment to rapidly automate sophisticated IT production processes. Execution of these automated processes can be triggered ad hoc or through linkages to state policies, schedule policies, or other events and conditions.

Schedule Policy Builder
Robust agenda and calendaring mechanism, which allows complex time-based conditions to be established as triggering mechanisms for ActionPlans and/or specific tasks.

Key features and capabilities of the Policy Creation Environment are:

• Declarative Policies
  Declarative Policies allow system owners to define the desired state(s) for a business system and what actions to take when the system leaves that state, without having to specify how to actually perform the necessary measurements to determine the system’s compliancy. In other words, Declarative Policies enable the system owner to apply sophisticated policies/automation without the complexity associated with hard-coding the configuration. This allows for faster implementation.

• Dynamic Data Sets
  For any Autonomic Policy to be effective, it must adapt to real-time changes in its environment in order to maximize the chances that it will be successful when executed. In addition, the business system owner and/or the Autonomic Policy itself should be capable of analyzing the results of successful and unsuccessful executions of the policy in order to incorporate this information into future executions. Without these capabilities, the policies would have drastically shortened life spans (extensibility) and limited areas of reuse (reusability/modularity). Oasis provides this functionality in an extremely powerful yet highly intuitive manner through its Dynamic Data Set technology. Dynamic Data Sets enable policies to gather environmental information and share it with other running or scheduled policies, thus enabling users to create systems of interdependent policies that adjust to environmental changes and abnormalities almost instantaneously.

• Visual Exception Handling
  It is impossible to account for every possible scenario in today’s complex and dynamic IT environments. These “unknown states” cause the typical automation tool to fail, sometimes silently. With Visual Exception Handling, Oasis policies can intelligently identify these unknown states or conditions and wait until they are resolved before proceeding. This process allows IT personnel to be notified of exception situations and given contextual information needed to remediate the situation without having to restart the corrective action/ActionPlan or restore any environmental changes that may have already occurred during execution.

• Active Swim Lanes
  When designing an Autonomic Policy that enforces compliance across organizational silos, it is critical that the policy clearly delineates the areas of ownership for the various operations of the policy. It is also imperative that the policy is capable of taking action when these boundaries are crossed. The Oasis ActionPlan Builder allows policy designers to create “Swim Lanes” that visually sort ActionPlan operations by organizational groups or individual stakeholders. Policy designers can then create specific actions that will be triggered when a policy changes from one lane to another. This enables policies to take unique actions based on the stakeholders of a particular component or operation – without requiring the policy designer to specify every possible condition under which a change in ownership may occur.

• Modular Design Constructs
  Oasis allows for infinite levels of policy nesting. It also provides the ability to create sophisticated process automation using rich conditional logic, parallelism, resource and process interdependencies, variable passing and human break-points. Additionally, investments in legacy development are preserved by incorporating existing scripts into more extensive meta-processes.
  
  
• Extensible Operations Suite
  Oasis provides pre-built Sensor and Effector Operations that encompass the most common tasks performed by best-of-breed third-party tools and applications.  However, every IT environment is unique and will require custom operations based on the specific tools and applications deployed within it.  Oasis addresses this through the combination of our standards-based interfaces (XML, SOAP, SNMP, SMTP, CLI) and our Custom Operation Designer through which users can create their own reusable operations to address their specific IT requirements.