Autonomous policy discovery
View Patent ↗Techniques for autonomous policy discovery are provided. Machines have personality profiles. The personality profiles permit machines to request advice from different machines having similar personality profiles. This facilitates automatic and autonomous discovery of policies for detected events and facilitates autonomous processing of actions, which are processed in response to the discovered policies. Furthermore, the personality profiles allow administrators to monitor and to dynamically alter policies associated with the machines.
1. A computer-implemented method residing in a computer-readable medium and executed by a first machine for performing the method, comprising:
detecting an event in a local environment of the first machine and determining that the event is not matched in an existing policy of the first machine;
discovering a policy that handles the event, the policy is discovered by requesting advice of a second machine in response to the event, the second machine is determined on behalf of the first machine by a third-party service that performs a query using a personality profile of the first machine and the event, and the third-party service finds a match in performance of that query with the second machine that indicates the second machine has a same personality profile to the personality profile of the first machine and has a policy that handles the event, and the same similar personality profile consists of hardware settings, resource identifiers, hardware configurations, resource configurations, protocol capabilities, peripheral device settings, and resource licenses of the second machine that matches the personality profile of the first machine and the personality profile of the first machine consists of hardware settings, resource identifiers, hardware configurations, resource configurations, protocol capabilities, peripheral device settings, and resource licenses of the first machine, and the policy includes one or more conditional statements that define one or more actions to take when the one or more conditional statements evaluate to true; and
performing the one or more actions on the first machine in response to received advice from the second machine and in response to the one or more conditional statements evaluating to true.
2. The method of claim 1 further comprising, publishing the personality profile of the first machine.
3. The method of claim 1 further comprising, retaining the advice received from the second machine within the local environment of the first machine for future reuse if the event is re-detected on the first machine.
4. The method of claim 3 , wherein retaining the advice further includes updating an existing policy to reflect the processing of the one or more actions on the first machine if the event is re-detected.
5. The method of claim 1 further comprising, subsequently receiving another event within the local environment of the first machine and received from a third machine as part of a new request for new advice from the third machine and communicating the action to the third machine for purposes of allowing the third machine to process the one or more actions.
6. The method of claim 1 , wherein detecting the event further includes detecting the event as at least one of a request to upgrade a resource that is received from an administrator, an autonomously detected problem on the first machine associated with the resource, a request to install the resource that is received from the administrator, and an autonomously detected abuse of usage of the resource on the first machine.