A framework for autonomic, ontology-based IT management

The growing complexity and heterogeneity of modern IT systems demand for intelligent management tools, capable of horizontally integrating technologies of different vendors and domains and vertically relating them with business processes and high level requirements. Due to their often hard-coded and unextendable management models, existing tools are not able to meet those requirements well. Recent advances in semantic web technologies let ontologies experience a revival for the modeling of domain knowledge and new standards as the Web Ontology Language (OWL) have been established by the W3C. The abilities to semantically model, map and link independent domains let them appear as very suitable for the application in IT management. Nevertheless, approaches for the implementation of an ontology-based IT management have shown that the scalability for large domain models is insufficient, important aspects are not expressible using the standards and the integration of continuous monitoring data is difficult. In this paper, dedicated solutions for each of those problems will be presented and combined into a comprehensive, ontology-based management framework. The proposed approach has been experimentally validated in a case study of a medium-sized management problem for an air traffic management system.