New Continuous Support System

An anonymous reader writes "eWeek is reporting on a new continuous open-source support system that helps to keep tabs on your mission-critical applications by providing constant diagnostic monitoring. The system is designed to match specific 'signatures' from your applications to a database of over 200,000 possible 'problem' signatures and alert the user for correction or analysis. From the article: 'SourceLabs' Continuous Support System features what Sebastian calls "adaptive diagnostic probes" that are fully integrated and configured for customer environments. The probes identify production issues and begin to gather diagnostic information to help get to the root of the problem, he said. Indeed, the probes can be configured so that as soon as a problem occurs, the SourceLabs support team extracts system information to find and resolve the problem. And the system includes a database of more than 200,000 signatures of problems that might occur.'"

Splunk with a different name?

[IGotYourSidekick]

How is this different from splunk? Now if it fixed problems for me...

Re:Signatures?

[Bruce Perens]

And, if you have something like this, you probably don't want the problem to occur at all.

You may not be the first customer to hit the problem. Also, the problem can manifest itself in a non-signature-dependent manner, like throwing an exception. Then if you are not the first to see it, signatures may come in to play in telling you why the exception happened.

Zenprise

[sfcat]

I previous worked for a company [zenprise.com] where I developed something very similar to this 'Continuous Support System'. But it was targeted at Exchange (MS, boo hiss, I know, I dislike them too).

Anyway, it was a very interesting and difficult problem. One of the biggest rubs was the level of assurance you had to provide. In otherwords, can you let the system make changes on its own or should it just recommend changes? If the system mis-diagnoses even one problem, it might break more stuff than it fixes. Most monitoring tools have big problems with 'false positives'. Add to that that the system can't necessary 'undo' all changes. Our solution was to allow the administrator to run the system in a variety of modes so they could choose if the system applied the fix automatically, with approval, or just suggested how to fix the problem.

As for how the system actually works, it basically takes a middle approach between ML (machine learning) and KR (knowledge representation). Basically, either you can hard code all the types of problems you have in a KR language, or setup some big neural net (or other ML algorithm) and let the system 'learn' problems. We split the difference and added some domain knowledge. Certain types of 'features' (parts of a diagnose such as the disk is slow) were diagnosed by ML algorithms, but ultimately KR rules written by Exchange experts actually diagnosed the problems and suggested repairs. A very time consuming, but more reliable solution (but less cool).

Re:Software is free, support is not

[mrbooze]

If the product is too difficult to use, no one will use it, and their revenues will crumble as well.

I think there is ample evidence in the enterprise software industry to contradict this theory.

Re:Software is free, support is not

[Anonymous Coward]

This only makes sense if you are talking about companies that sell support via time and materials, e.g. when something goes wrong, they charge you $XXX per hour.

In the case that you sell subscriptions, the software needs to be rock solid because you lose money on hard support calls. Large companies will still want support because of the case that something does go wrong, they need someone to call. Long term, as the market matures, you would expect support contracts to take into account the statistical chance of a errors in a system, and come up with appropriate pricing (similar to insurance).

The big news here, is that at SourceLabs we looked at the trend of supporting Open Source software and decided that long term this means innovating on support itself. If what you are buying is support, than your support companies should be competing with each other on how well they can provide this. This first set of tools and services is our way of jumping into this fray.

We do this by monitoring activities in the community such as new bugs, issues that come up on mailing lists, etc. We then index these, and digest these through a variety of automatic and manual methods. From this repository, we are able to both preventively warn customers of new issues found in both our internal certification efforts as well as new issues that show up from the community. In addition, we have probe technology that is able to pull information out of running systems when problems come up. One of the actions these probes can take is to match the information it pulled from the running system against our repsitory to see if the issue looks similar to one we've seen before or one that has come up on lists before.

As Open Source gets more traction and more companies come in to support it, we expect that there will be more competition over offering the best support. This will be a good thing, because it will force companies to fight over offering better services. As one of those companies, if you are able to be much better at
        1) Understanding the Risks of the software you are supporting
        2) Reducing the cost/time to resolution of an issue

you can begin to do a much better job of providing support than your competitors. This is our strategy. We want to make better technologies for providing support, so that we can be more responsive and can resolve problems faster. Long term, this will make support cheaper and more efficient. It will also make customers happier.

        Will Pugh
        Chief Architect, Sourcelabs