iSRE: plataforma de definição e execução de procedimentos de suporte em sistemas em rede

Abstract

Problems that occur in components of a network system may cause service disruption, elevate the operating costs and contribute to material and imaterial damages to organizations. One option to minimize the impact of problems on the components of the system is to add more people able to perform tasks that enable the operation, maintenance and update of those components. But, this approach can be financially not feasible, besides other facts, due to cost associated with people. Another option that can minimize the impact is to adopt and integrate to the system automation elements capable of minimize manual intervention. In this context, we can highlight two approaches, which are not mutually exclusive, being the adoption of autonomic computing elements and robotic process automation (RPA). These approaches tend to be more scalable, centralized, less error prone and to offer more opportunities to standardize process if compared to solutions that rely solely on the increase of human resources to support the operation, maintance and upgrade of the system. On that direction, we verified a set o limitation on the tools and available related work that contemplate some of the principles that characterize autonomic computing and robotic process automation elements. In this work, we present the iServiceReliabilityEngineer (iSRE) platform, on which we design and implement, via a prototype, the mechanisms that make feasible, in a practical way, some characteristics found in autonomic computing and RPA. That prototype is evaluate through a series of experiments. We also show a qualitative analysis that highlights the theme relevance and the interest by profissionals that work with activities related to network and distributed systems management.