IBM autonomic toolkit to speed IT troubleshooting

IBM said on Tuesday that later this year it will release a standards-based toolkit that automates the task of spotting glitches in complex IT systems.

Called the IBM Build to Manage Toolkit for Problem Determination, the software was developed at IBM's Software Laboratory in Yamato, Japan and will be incorporated into commercial products next year.

Part of IBM's ongoing autonomic computing initiative to make computing system self-healing and self-managing, the toolkit automatically generates a list, or "cheat sheet," of potential problems and solutions.

The software conforms to the OASIS Web Services Distributed Management Event Format, a format for reporting log information typically used by administrators trying to pinpoint problems.

IBM has contributed some of the components of the toolkit to the Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform and the Apache Muse open-source project.

"This autonomic technology allows us to envision a day within a few short years when all IT problems are resolved in a fraction of the time it takes today. This has the potential to unleash enormous productivity gains from such a dramatic decrease in downtime," Dr. Kazuo Iwano, a vice president at the IBM Software Laboratory in Yamato, Japan.