Cause-chain analysis using objects

摘要

Identification of the root cause of a change in the system, as well as any side-effects (“ancillary changes”) caused by the change via an object attribute. A change resulting from a request in a system, whether originating from a user, service, or workflow, has an associated request object that captures the details of the change. An ancillary change resulting from the prior change is correlated to the prior change through a parent attribute on the request object that identifies the prior change as the immediate parent. Thus, all downstream ancillary changes resulting from a request can be correlated back to the root request (change) via the parent attributes of the ancillary changes.

主权项

1. A computer-implemented change management system, comprising:
a request object created in response to and associated with a change in an environment, the request object related to a request that caused the change and comprising a parent attribute that points to a previous change, thereby enabling the request object to capture details of the change, the request causes ancillary requests associated with ancillary changes and ancillary request objects created for the ancillary changes, the ancillary request objects comprising respective ancillary parent attributes that reference the change as parent of the ancillary changes, the ancillary changes captured in respective ancillary request objects; a correlation component configured to correlate ancillary changes that result from the change via the corresponding parent object, to determine the request associated with the change as a root cause of all changes in the environment; and a microprocessor that executes computer-executable instructions in a memory associated with the creation of the request object and the correlation component.