A solution for identifying the root cause of problems in IT change management

The reuse of knowledge acquired by operators to diagnose failures in Information Technology (IT) infrastructures has potential to decrease the recurrence of failures and, consequently, reduce possible losses and maintenance costs. Nevertheless, existing solutions to support failure diagnosis lack of flexibility to adapt to a constantly changing IT environment. As a result, diagnostic is performed in an ad hoc and static fashion, which hampers the reuse of knowledge to solve similar failures affecting different elements of an IT infrastructure. To bridge this gap, in this paper we propose an extension of Common Information Model (CIM), supported by a conceptual solution for the identification of the root causes of problems, adaptable to changes in the target infrastructure and applicable to similar failures. Experiments carried out considering typical failures during the deployment of IT changes provide evidence about the efficacy of the proposed solution.