System and method for providing autonomic management of a networked system using an action-centric approach

A system to provide autonomic management of a storage system using an action-centric approach, comprising:

• a managed system that includes a set of resources for servicing requests from at least one application, the set of resources including at least a processor, a memory, and storage, the managed system also including, a set of observables that represent the managed system;
• a policy specification logic block comprising multiple policies to maintain a policy specification associated with the managed system, the policy specification treating actions as software objects and defining at least one attribute of the software objects that facilitates reasoning with regards to tradeoffs involved in choosing each of the software objects and deciding which action to invoke among several available options associated with each of the software objects, the attribute providing information corresponding to the effects of invoking an action and the preconditions upon which the effectiveness of the action depends, the effects of invoking an action being specified as a set of behavior implications, wherein a behavior implication comprises a behavior impact vector which describes how the action impacts the managed system's resources and observables;
• a reasoning logic block to provide for the determining of action rules using a combination of logic and information obtained from the policy specification;
• and
• a learning logic block to couple the policy specification logic block with the reasoning logic block to improve an understanding of a managed system, whereby, the learning is continuous and provides for autonomic evolvement of the system.