Dynamic Systems Initiative Update

A Microsoft project called the Dynamic Systems Initiative (DSI) is developing models, tools, and products to manage the company’s products more effectively. The central idea: Developers should ship their software with the information required to manage it, rather than expecting third parties or customers to reverse-engineer the product and create that information after the fact. Specifically, developers should ship configuration models in software that describe the components the software includes or relies on to aid installation, configuration, and migration of the software and build instrumentation and health models into software to help detect and diagnose problems when the software is run. Both models would use a standard description language, called the System Definition Model (SDM).

According to the plan, future Microsoft’s developer tools will help developers write or generate models in the SDM language as they create software; future management products will exploit SDM models to automate operations on the software. For example, in the future, SMS will use an SDM configuration model of an application to automatically detect a missing or damaged OS component required by that application and then reinstall the OS component. MOM will use a health model of a component to identify which application events or counters to monitor and then determine when to send an alert to an administrator.