Automatic Policy Rule Extraction for Configuration Management

We propose a new IT automation technology for configuration management: automatic baseline policy extraction out of the Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB). Whereas authoring a configuration policy rule manually is time consuming and unlikely to realize the actual state of the configurations in the overall organization, this new approach summarizes the de-facto configurations from the data. IT staff, instead of authoring the policy rule, is required to simply validate and possibly enhance the automatically extracted policy. Our technology applies data-mining to organization's configuration assets in the CMDB, and automatically identifies repeating structures of compound configurations. Based on these repeating structures, we build policy rules for compound configuration items. The heart of our technique is a new distance measure we introduce between the configuration assets, whose computation is reduced to a minimum-cost flow problem.