Relationship Network Graphs for Automatic Service Dependency Discovery
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Existing IT systems struggle to accurately identify and maintain dependencies between services due to their complexity and non-intuitiveness, leading to inefficiencies in incident resolution and change management.
Innovation Solution
A relationship network graph is constructed using interaction data among entities responsible for services, where nodes represent entities and edges represent interactions, enabling automatic identification and maintenance of service dependencies.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If manual declaration of service dependencies by service owners is used, then some dependencies can be identified, but many dependencies remain unrecognized leading to incomplete dependency information
Solution Approach 1:
The system automatically discovers service dependencies by monitoring interactions between services without requiring manual input from service owners. The dependency graph is constructed and maintained autonomously through observation of service-to-service communications, eliminating the burden of manual dependency declaration while ensuring comprehensive dependency information is captured.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent replaces the manual mechanical process of service owners declaring dependencies with an automated electronic monitoring system. This system uses event streaming and graph analysis to automatically detect and track service interactions, substituting human effort with computational processes that continuously discover and update dependency relationships.
2Loss of information
If monitoring systems send information to all services, then visibility into operational metrics is provided, but the entire system is flooded with information reducing efficiency
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments information distribution by using the dependency graph to identify which services are actually dependent on a given service. Instead of broadcasting information to all services, the system routes operational metrics and alerts only to services that have a documented dependency relationship, ensuring relevant services receive necessary information while avoiding unnecessary noise for unrelated services.
Solution Approach 2:
The dependency graph acts as an intermediary layer between the monitoring system and services. It receives operational information and intelligently routes it to appropriate services based on pre-established dependency relationships, mediating between the need for broad visibility and the need for targeted information delivery to maintain processing efficiency.
Data Source
AI summary
Interaction data between entities responsible for services in an information technology environment are collected. The interaction data includes communications between the entities where at least some of the entities represent respective persons, teams, or organizations of people. A relationship network graph based is constructed on the interaction data. The nodes of the relationship network graph represent the entities and the edges of the relationship network graph represent interactions between the entities. Dependencies between the services are identified by traversing the relationship network graph.