Determining problem dependencies in application dependency discovery, reporting, and management tool

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-11614943-B2
Application number	US-202217833618-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Jun 6, 2022
Priority date	Jun 27, 2019
Publication date	Mar 28, 2023
Grant date	Mar 28, 2023

Abstract

Techniques for monitoring operating statuses of an application and its dependencies are provided. A monitoring application may collect and report the operating status of the monitored application and each dependency. Through use of existing monitoring interfaces, the monitoring application can collect operating status without requiring modification of the underlying monitored application or dependencies. The monitoring application may determine a problem service that is a root cause of an unhealthy state of the monitored application. Dependency analyzer and discovery crawler techniques may automatically configure and update the monitoring application. Machine learning techniques may be used to determine patterns of performance based on system state information associated with performance events and provide health reports relative to a baseline status of the monitored application. Also provided are techniques for testing a response of the monitored application through modifications to API calls. Such tests may be used to train the machine learning model.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1. A computer-implemented method comprising:
configuring a monitoring application to monitor a first application and a plurality of dependencies using a plurality of monitoring interfaces, wherein the plurality of dependencies are associated with the first application and comprises at least:
one or more first level dependencies of the first application; and
one or more second level dependencies of the first application, wherein each second level dependency is a dependency of a corresponding first level dependency;

determining, via the monitoring application, that the first application has an unhealthy operating status;
identifying, by the monitoring application, a problem dependency of the plurality of dependencies through a tree traversal process by:
determining that a first dependency of the first level dependencies has an unhealthy operating status;
determining whether each dependency of the second level dependencies, that correspond to dependencies of the first dependency, has a healthy operating status; and
identifying the first dependency as the problem dependency based on determining that each dependency of the second level dependencies has a healthy operating status;

identifying a data resource associated with the first dependency, wherein the data resource corresponds to a data element that the first dependency provides to the first application;
determining, by the monitoring application, that the data resource provided by the first dependency is also available from a third dependency, such that a same data element is available from the first dependency and the third dependency; and
generating, by the monitoring application and based on identifying the first dependency as the problem dependency, a notification indicating the problem dependency and indicating that the particular data resource is available from the third dependency.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein:
the first dependency corresponds to an Application Programming Interface (API) associated with the data resource utilized by the first application, and
the third dependency corresponds to a second API also configured to provide the particular data resource.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein:
the first dependency corresponds to a network used to communicate with the data resource utilized by the first application, and
the third dependency corresponds to a second network also configured to communicate with the particular data resource.

4. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:
automatically reconfiguring the first application to obtain the particular data resource from the third dependency.

5. The method of claim 1 , further comprising:
determining a dependency map for the first application based on data lineage documentation associated with the first application; and
wherein determining that the data resource provided by the first dependency is also available from a third dependency is based on the data lineage documentation.

6. The method of claim 1 , wherein determining that the data resource provided by the first dependency is also available from a third dependency is based on incident record data associated with past incidents where the first dependency also had an unhealthy operating status, and
wherein the incident record data indicates a corrective action taken in response to a corresponding incident event.

7. The method of claim 1 , wherein determining the operating status of a given dependency comprises determining one or more of:
whether a resource associated with the given dependency is accessible;
a response latency associated with requests to the given dependency;
an error rate associated with requests to the given dependency; or
an error state or error message provided by the given dependency.

8. The method of claim 1 , wherein the first level dependencies comprise sub-dependencies of one or more immediate dependencies of the first application.

9. The method of claim 1 , wherein the first level dependencies comprise sub-dependencies of one or more dependencies of the first application.

10. A monitoring system comprising:
one or more processors; and
memory storing instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the monitoring system to:
configure a monitoring application to monitor a first application and a plurality of dependencies using a plurality of monitoring interfaces, wherein the plurality of dependencies are associated with the first application and comprises at least:
one or more first level dependencies of the first application; and
one or more second level dependencies of the first application, wherein each second level dependency is a dependency of a corresponding first level dependency;

determine, via the monitoring application, that the first application has an unhealthy operating status;
identify, by the monitoring application, a problem dependency of the plurality of dependencies through a tree traversal process by causing the monitoring system to:
determine that a first dependency of the first level dependencies has an unhealthy operating status;
determine whether each dependency of the second level dependencies, that correspond to dependencies of the first dependency, has a healthy operating status; and
identify the first dependency as the problem dependency based on determining that each dependency of the second level dependencies has a healthy operating status;

identify a data resource associated with the first dependency, wherein the data resource corresponds to a data element that the first dependency provides to the first application;
determine, by the monitoring application, that the data resource provided by the first dependency is also available from a third dependency, such that a same data element is available from the first dependency and the third dependency; and
generate, by the monitoring application and based on identifying the first dependency as the problem dependency, a notification indicating the problem dependency and indicating that the particular data resource is available from the third dependency.

11. The monitoring system of claim 10 , wherein the instructions further cause the monitoring system to:
automatically re-configure the first application to obtain the particular data resource from the third dependency.

12. The monitoring system of claim 10 , wherein the instructions further cause the monitoring system to:
determine a dependency map for the first application based on data lineage documentation associated with the first application; and
wherein the instructions cause the monitoring system to determine that the data resource provided by the first dependency is also available from a third dependency based on the data lineage documentation.

13. The monitoring system of claim 10 , wherein the instructions cause the monitoring system to determine that the data resource provided by the first dependency is also available from a third dependency based on incident record data associated with past incidents where the first dependency also had an unhealthy operating status, and
wherein the incident record data indicates a corrective action taken in response to a corresponding incident event.

14. The monitoring system of claim 10 , wherein the first level dependencies comprise sub-dependencies of one or more immediate dependencies of the first application.

15. The monitoring system of claim 10 , wherein the first level dependencies comprise sub-dependencies of one or more dependencies of the first application.

16. One or more non-transitory computer readable media

Assignees

• Capital One Services Llc

Inventors

• Balasubramanian Muralidharan
• Barnum Eric K
• Dallen Julie
• Watson David

Classifications

• G06F16/9027

  Trees · CPC title

• G06N20/00 Primary

  Machine learning · CPC title

• G06F11/3006

  where the computing system is distributed, e.g. networked systems, clusters, multiprocessor systems (multiprogramming arrangements G06F9/46; allocation of resources G06F9/50) · CPC title

• G06F2201/81

  Threshold · CPC title

• G06F16/903

  Querying (for retrieval from the web G06F16/953) · CPC title