Patent ID: 8543699

Claim:
A method for evaluating a systems management policy in an environment comprising a plurality of domains, the method comprising: retrieving the policy, by a first autonomic manager in a first domain of the plurality of domains, from a policy storage, wherein the policy comprises a condition and an action to be taken when the condition evaluates to TRUE, and wherein the policy expresses the condition as a plurality of sensor values related to a plurality of system values by a plurality of logical operators, and at least two of the plurality of sensor values belong to different ones of the plurality of domains; forwarding the policy, by the first autonomic manager, to a second autonomic manager in a second domain of the plurality of domains; evaluating at least a portion of the condition by the first autonomic manager, in accordance with sensor data relating to a resource managed by the first autonomic manager, before forwarding the policy; wherein the evaluating at least a portion of the condition comprises simplifying the condition by removing a portion of the plurality of sensor values relating to a portion of the condition that has already been evaluated; and receiving, at the first autonomic manager, at least partial evaluation results for the condition from a third autonomic manager in a third domain of the plurality of domains, wherein the first autonomic manager, the second autonomic manager, and the third autonomic manager are arranged in a ring configuration such that the evaluating occurs in a cascading manner.