Health State Modeling Process

Before a quality Management Pack can be designed for an application, the author should have a complete understanding of what it means for the application to be healthy. Health state modeling helps authors gain this understanding.

During the health state modeling process, an author will learn and document the following:

• The health states that an application can enter into, such as Running, Degraded Performance, etc.

• The manageability instrumentation exposed by the relevant application that can be used to detect the existence or a transition to various health states, such as Windows Event Log events, Windows Performance Counters, etc.

• The definition for each health state. For each undesirable health state, documentation is included about verifying that the state exists, the causes of it, and the steps that an end user can perform to bring the application back to health.

Once an author has completed the health state modeling process, theyll have acquired most, if not all, of the information theyll need to design a Management Pack specification, from a rules perspective. In addition, the author may learn a great deal about the sufficiency--or lack of-- the manageability instrumentation of the application itself. This information can be forwarded to the application owner/vendor.