Managing IT resources with an agent

Managing IT resources with an agent

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Imagine yourself working for a bank with
hundreds of branches scattered all over Indonesia as the manager
responsible for its huge, distributed network. How can you make
sure that all your company's IT resources are well-maintained and
that their capacity is always adequate?

With today's computer hardware and software technologies, you
won't have to physically travel around the country and visit each
of the branches to check each individual PC, server, mini and
even mainframe computer that it may have. Nor will you have to
hire highly skilled -- and highly paid -- technical support personnel
to man the help desks. A type of software suite called
"enterprise management framework" will do it for you. Currently
two strong contending products are fiercely battling it out in
this field: Tivoli Enterprise from Tivoli (an IBM company) and
Unicenter TNG (TNG stands for 'The Next Generation') from
Computer Associates.

These suites of end-to-end management tools promise to help
large corporations manage their widely dispersed IT resources
through a centralized control system by automating a lot of
functions, including maintenance and asset management. As you can
imagine, in such a huge environment there may be UNIX servers, NT
servers, OS/2 servers, a Novell network operating system and many
other platforms. Because of such diversity, these "umbrella"
tools are supposed to be able to also work on top of all these
different platforms and facilitate management so that the
utilization of the resources can be maximized and disruption can
be minimized.

Two typical problems that IT personnel in such huge computing
environments usually face are downed servers and an unexpected
jump in the number of users that means unanticipated increased
demands for resources. Unlike our home PC, which we can replace
at any time if it crashes, the servers in these organizations
cannot stop functioning just because maximum capacity has been
overstepped or one component has failed. Just imagine how
frustrated we will become each time we are told by the teller
that the bank's server is down and we cannot make any
transaction.

Both Tivoli Enterprise and Unicenter TNG use the so-called
'agents' that are deployed to the individual resource in the
enterprise network, including the PCs and the notebooks. These
software agents regularly collect data from their assigned
location and report any extraordinary event in their target
environment to the central management software. Based on these
reports, the IT personnel, who may be notified through pagers or
E-mail in case the light has turned from green to yellow, will
then be able to manage the network better by reallocating
resources as needed, take preventive action or pinpoint the
source of a problem quickly when it occurs.

The increasing importance of complete management of IT
resources has led companies such as Computer Associates (CA) to
find a new way of simplifying the immensely complex task. One
reasonable option is to use a neural network to predict when
capacities will be used up to their maximum so that actions can
be taken to prevent disasters.

Neural Agent

You may still recall the technology called neural networks.
Simply put, a neural network is an attempt to imitate the
sophistication and intelligence of the human brain. It is called
a network because it consists of numerous "units" of simple
processors--each with its own memory--that are connected to each
other to form a system that tries to mimic the brain.

The most important aspect of the resemblance is the ability to
sort out patterns and learn from trial and error. With it comes
the ability to discern and extract the relationships underlying
the data that we feed it with. With these two abilities, the
artificial intelligence system can even make decisions based on a
set of dynamic rules. In addition, the more data it has the more
intelligent a neural network will become.

As an application of the neural network, the new Neugents from
CA also learns as it goes. The name Neugents actually comes from
'Neural' and 'Agent'. This application is actually a part of CA's
strategy in moving to its next version of Unicenter TNG, i.e.,
Unicenter TND (D for 'Dimension').

What, specifically, does Neugents do to help simplify the
management of an enterprise IT infrastructure? Its agents, which
are deployed to mission critical servers, will continuously
monitor a number of parameters in the systems. Based on these
parameters and with the help of the historical data that has been
collected at the Unicenter TNG, Neugents will then be able to
make a predictive statement such as "There is a 70 percent
probability that Server X will crash in an hour."

The server crash may be caused by overloading, for example, as
the number of its users keeps rising while its capacity remains
constant. When the IT administrator sees such a message in his
Unicenter console, he will then be able to make a proper decision
to prevent the crash, for example by temporarily shutting down
other services and allocating the freed resources to accommodate
the increasing number of users at server X.

Can a human being do what Neugents does? As Kieandy Susanto
from CA reminded me, human beings can only process information in
a limited number of dimensions, perhaps three of them at the
most. A computer server, on the other hand, has tens of
parameters that determine its overall performance, including
memory, hard disk, I/O and processing capacities. It will be very
hard for a human brain to process all these data and make a quick
decision based on them. A computer, on the contrary, has no
problem handling multidimensional data. Herein lies the benefit
of Neugents. It can process data in dozens of different
dimensions and make a prediction based on them.

Interestingly, although we may not realize it, the neural
network-based systems and parent technologies (artificial
intelligence and expert systems) are already widely in use all
over the world although they have long ceased to be buzzwords.
The latest generation of optical character recognition and voice
recognition tools already incorporates the neural network
technology, and so do the systems that are used by banks to
estimate investment risks, for example. However, CA has been the
first to bring the technology to the enterprise management tools,
and it may be some time before other vendors will follow suit.