Embedding of Causal Directed Graph (CDG) Technology in the BMC PATROL® Diagnostic Management Product Line
Upgrading to model-based diagnosis
BMC Patrol® provided no built-in machinery to analyze enterprise-wide applications involving interactions between multiple servers, but customers needed this for multi-server applications like Microsoft Exchange. Customers needed to troubleshoot failures and performance problems, which inherently involved interactions of software on multiple computers at once. Also, Patrol provided no organized methodology or modeling tools for automating diagnosis -- everything had to be custom-coded procedurally as a set of scripts -- which is not very practical for multi-server applications whose configuration may change fairly often.
The solution was to use a model-based approach to diagnosis, based on causal digraph technology.
BMC used causal digraph models at the heart of their PATROL® Diagnostic Management product line, formerly called PATROL® Diagnose. This technology was based on the Causal Directed Graph fault diagnosis product developed by Greg Stanley and associates while at Gensym, also sold as SymCure by Gensym. This was used for applications in network and systems management, using models of IP networks, servers, and applications such as Microsoft Exchange.
Technical papers and presentations on the BMC application of CDG
The white paper Patrol Root Cause Analysis - A New Standard of Event Automation in an Enterprise Computing Environment (pdf) describes the model-based reasoning technology and its application. The white paper PATROL® Diagnose: A Modeling Approach to Root-Cause Analysis (pdf) provides a good overview.
Product descriptions are also available. The first product was PATROL® for Microsoft Exchange Server Diagnose (pdf). Their second product was PATROL® for Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Diagnose (pdf).
The presentation overheads Advanced Management Technologies for Exchange 5.5 (PowerPoint) (737K) were presented by Greg Todd of BMC at the Microsoft Exchange Conference 99.
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