Managing application service dependencies with XML and the resource description framework

This paper describes a novel approach for applying XML, XPath and RDF to the problem of describing, querying and computing the dependencies among services in a distributed computing system. This becomes increasingly important in today's networked environments where applications and services rely on both local and outsourced sub-services. However, service dependencies are not made explicit in today's systems, thus making the task of problem determination particularly difficult. A key contribution of the paper is a Web-based architecture for retrieving and handling dependency information from various managed resources. Its core component is a dependency query facility allowing the application of queries and filters to dependency models; its output is a consolidated dependency graph that can then be used by fault management applications to perform additional problem determination tasks or event correlation. The definition of an XML based notation for specifying dependencies facilitates information sharing between the components involved in the process.