Self-management has often been proposed as a means to reduce the growing complexity of administration in distributed systems. We argue that this can be achieved through aggressive automation of management tasks. To reach a high level of automation we propose to take an inference-based approach: codify best practices so that they can be reasoned about and adapted at runtime. Concerns specific to distributed systems are dealt with by the innate support for knowledge sharing.

We introduce the methodology along with a reference architecture. The method?s validity is tested by applying a preliminary implementation to a handful of practical problems.