Patent ID: 7840857

Claim:
A method for automated handling of resolvable and non-resolvable errors in system management flows consisting of system management tasks, wherein said system management tasks ( 10 - 12 ) are provided by system management applications to perform certain operations on the managed IT infrastructure ( 1 ), wherein said system management tasks ( 10 - 12 ) provide interfaces ( 13 - 15 ) via said system management tasks which are invoked ( 20 ) during the execution of the system management flow definition by a Workflow Engine ( 30 ), characterized by the steps of: executing a system management flow definition ( 35 ) by said Workflow Engine ( 30 ), wherein said system management flow definition additionally includes an ErrorHandlingStrategy attribute for determining the processing mode of the system management flow in the case of errors, wherein said processing mode can be “compensate”, or “forced”, intercepting execution of a task as defined in said system management flow definition by said Workflow Engine ( 30 ), invoking Error Handling component ( 40 ) via “invokeTask interface” ( 41 ), wherein said Error Handling component ( 40 ) uses an error handling interface with an Error Handling Layer ( 90 , 70 , 100 ) for invocation of system management tasks and for error handling, wherein said Error Handling Layer ( 90 , 70 , 100 ) uses a Processing Context Store ( 80 ) storing processing state information of invoked tasks, wherein said Error Handling component ( 40 ) performs the steps of: invoking a system management task as defined by said task via the system management task's startProcessing operation ( 72 ) of said error handling interface by said Error Handling Component ( 40 ) and storing processing state information of said invoked task in a Processing Context Store ( 68 ), wherein said Processing Context Store ( 68 ) contains information of each task being invoked including a unique task ID, a system management flow definition ID to which said task belongs to, processing state information of said invoked task, wherein said processing state can be started, completed, or compensated, and contains information for resuming processing of said invocated task, receiving error condition via the “suspendProcessing” operation ( 44 ) of said error handling interface from said Error Handling Layer ( 90 , 70 , 100 ), switching to the processing mode as defined in the “ErrorHandlingStrategy”, and processing said system management flow in a processing mode as defined in said “ErrorHandlingStrategy” accordingly.