Managing your total IT cost of ownership
Communications of the ACM - Internet abuse in the workplace and Game engines in scientific research
Reducing the cost of IT operations: is automation always the answer?
HOTOS'05 Proceedings of the 10th conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems - Volume 10
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
A performance and usability comparison of automated planners for IT change planning
Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Network and Services Management
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In order to deal with failures in the deployment of IT changes and to always leave IT infrastructures into consistent states, we proposed in a previous work, a solution to automate the generation of rollback plans in IT change management systems. The solution was based on a mechanism that treats Requests for Change (RFC) (or parts of them) as a single atomic transaction. In this work, we extend our previous investigation and present more flexible and fine grained treatment of failures. The paper first presents extensions to our conceptual model in order (i) to give IT operators some flexibility in defining rollback actions, for example, by allowing the rollback plan to not only be a reversed change plan; and (ii) to execute different recovery activities depending on the cause and location of a problem. The paper then focuses on a refined manner to handle and treat failures in change deployments. We follow the ITIL version 3 best practises which suggest that, depending on the RFC context, the human operator can classify activities as reversible or irreversible. Such classification allows change management systems to automatically generate more accurate remediation plans. The proposal takes into account not only a precise way to define how rollback plans will be generated, but also an intuitive method enabling the operator to define compensation activities in order to complete the RFC successfully, even with the occurrence of failures. To prove the concept and technical feasibility, we have materialized our solution in the CHANGELEDGE prototype that, using elements of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), is able to generate correct remediation plans to handle and treat failures in IT change management systems.