Approaches to building self healing systems using dependency analysis

Typical distributed transaction environments are a heterogeneous collection of hardware and software resources. An example of such an environment is an electronic store front where users can launch a number of different transactions to complete one or more interactions with the system. One of the challenges in managing such an environment is to figure out the root cause of a performance or throughput problem that manifests itself at a user access point and take appropriate action, preferably in an automated way. Our paper addresses this problem by analyzing the dependency relationship among various software components. We also provide theoretical insight into how a set of transactions can be generated to pinpoint the root cause of a performance problem that is manifested at the user access point.