Intelligent system health indicator

1. A method for handling updates by an administrative system, the method comprising the computer implemented steps of:

responsive to detecting an update for a data processing system, querying a database to determine an effect of the update on the data processing system, wherein a configuration that identifies both hardware and software of the data processing system is used in querying the database, and wherein the effect of the update obtained by the querying of the database includes a risk of not applying the update;

responsive to receiving a response from the database that includes the effect, selectively modifying a health status of the data processing system using the response to form a modified health status, wherein the health status and the configuration are maintained in another database; and

visually presenting the effect of the update to a user of the administrative system.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the effect of the update is visually presented to the user for a plurality of different data processing systems having different respective health statuses.

3. The method of claim 2 , wherein the effect includes a cause of the risk that is visually presented to the user.

4. The method of claim 1 , wherein the another database further comprises a list of regression test cases associated with the update that should be run on the data processing system after the update has been applied at the data processing system.

5. The method of claim 1 , wherein the querying step includes:

sending a query to an expert system associated with the database, wherein the expert system is not the data processing system.

6. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

scheduling application of the update for the data processing system based on the modified health status, wherein if the modified health status corresponds to a danger status the application for the update is automatically scheduled to occur.

7. The method of claim 1 , wherein the modified health status includes a risk of not applying the update.

8. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

selectively applying the update to the data processing system based on the modified health status of the data processing system.

9. The method of claim 1 , wherein the response includes a test case and further comprising:

running the test case to determine whether to apply the update to the data processing system.

10. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

calculating a weight value for the update, wherein the weight value is used to selectively modify the health status of the data processing system.

11. An administrative data processing system comprising:

a bus;

a communications unit connected to the bus;

a memory connected to the bus, wherein the memory includes a set of instructions; and

a processor unit connected to the bus, wherein the processor unit executes the set of instructions to perform a method to handle updates; the method comprising

querying a database to determine an effect of an update on a data processing system in response to detecting the update for the data processing system, wherein a configuration that identifies both hardware and software of the data processing system is used in querying the database, and wherein the effect of the update obtained by the querying of the database includes a risk of not applying the update;

selectively modifying a health status of the data processing system using a response to the querying to form a modified health status in response to receiving the response from the database that includes the effect, wherein the health status and the configuration are maintained in another database; and

visually presenting the effect of the update to a user.