Integrity/Optegrity
Event-Oriented Technology for Operations Management
The Integrity/ Optegrity/ Operations Expert product line
Integrity provides an infrastructure for building operations management systems, from small applications through large, enterprise-wide systems. The underlying technology for the Integrity product line, (and Optegrity, for the process industry version), was developed by Greg Stanley, and extended by associates at Gensym. This product line has also previously been named Operations Expert, Fault Expert, and OPA (Operations Assistant). While initially applied at AT&T for network and systems management, it was aimed at managing all types of operations, focusing on management and analysis of events, making decisions, and automating actions as a result of those decisions. It applies to management of networks/systems/applications/services/IT, and also applies to process control (Abnormal Situation Management). It includes the OPAC graphical language, used for event correlation, diagnostics and for automated recovery. It supported a variety of event correlation techniques and diagnostic techniques for root cause analysis, including decision trees, state transition diagrams, categorization of events for query of the event history, and others. It also includes a root cause analysis technique invented by Greg Stanley, based on analyzing events associated with undirected graphs. This was called IPRA, a root cause analyzer for IP networks.
Technical papers describing the technology and its application
Some applications of Operations Expert/Integrity to AT&T (including their WorldNet Internet Service) are summarized in the following white paper:
Intelligent Management for Large Networks (pdf)
The Integrity technology was introduced by Greg Stanley at the keynote session of the Summit Enterprise Management Conference, Nov., 1994,
Using Expert Systems to Manage Diverse Networks and Systems (pdf)
The above presentation highlights the OPAC graphical language which handled event processing in a generic way, through a graphical language and event-oriented data store. Integrity and Optegrity also included the CDG/symcure technology, also described in the Integrity Reasoner White Paper (pdf).
Application to service level and general service management applications is briefly described in
Service Level Management With Integrity (pdf) . Product descriptions of Integrity, Optegrity, and related parts of the Integrity product line, can be found at the Gensym web site.
An example of usage of part of the technology in a process application is in the alarm management section of the Tennessee Gas Pipeline Application (pdf)
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