Patent ID: 7349826

Claim:
A method for proactive problem determination and component failure avoidance comprising: assembling a plurality of causal ladders, each of the plurality of causal ladders representing a plurality of sequential stages of criticality of a component problem that resulted in a system failure, wherein assembling a plurality of causal ladders comprises: receiving a plurality of failure events that resulted in a previous failure of a component; identifying a component problem related to an occurrence of each of the plurality of failure events; correlating each of the plurality of failure events to a discrete sequential stage of criticality in a causal ladder representing a respective identified component problem; and assigning at least one remedy to each discrete sequential stage of criticality of the causal ladder representing the respective identified component problem; for each of the plurality of sequential stages of criticality in each of the respective causal ladders, associating at least one remedy for a component problem; identifying a potential component failure from one of the plurality of causal ladders representing a component problem relating to the potential component failure, wherein identifying a potential component failure from one of the plurality of causal ladders comprises: receiving a runtime system event; correlating the received runtime system event to the at least one of the plurality of failure events correlated to a discrete sequential stage of criticality in one of the plurality of causal ladders representing the identified component problem; and determining a criticality of the identified component problem on the correlated discrete sequential stage of criticality in the causal ladder; and determining a problem solution for the component problem based on the one of the plurality of causal ladders representing the component problem, wherein determining a problem solution for the component problem comprises: accessing policy associated with the correlated discrete sequential stage of criticality in the causal ladder; ranking the at least one remedy for the correlated discrete sequential stage of criticality in the causal ladder representing the identified component problem based on policy associated with the correlated discrete sequential stage; and selecting a highest ranking solution for the identified component problem.