Reliability Infrastructure

Applies To: Windows Server 2008

The Reliability Infrastructure is comprised of operating system components that support reliability monitoring and diagnosis. The Diagnostic Infrastructure uses built-in testing and diagnostic scenarios to examine the current system state and provide warnings or resolutions. The Reliability Analysis Component supplies data about software installations and upgrades, application and operating system errors, and hardware issues to Reliability Monitor. This data is used to calculate Reliablity Monitor's System Stability Index. Restart Manager is used by installation and upgrade programs to manage resources that are needed during the installation or upgrade process so that a system restart is not required after those programs run. Resource Exhaustion Detection and Resolution (RADAR) notifies you when the system is critically low on resources and provides you with a list of the top resource consumers so that you can close them to restore system stability. In Windows Vista, RADAR includes memory leak diagnosis to help you identify applications that might have memory leaks, which can result in resource exhaustion or system instability.

Hierarchy of Managed Entities

Managed Entities

Name Description

Diagnostic Infrastructure

The Diagnostic Infrastructure is used to diagnose and correct problems on your system. It is an automated feature and does not require user configuration or maintenance.

Diagnostic Policy Service

The Diagnostic Policy service enables problem detection, troubleshooting, and resolution for Windows components. If this service is stopped, diagnostics will no longer function. If this service is disabled, any services that explicitly depend on it will fail to start.

Diagnostic Scenarios

Diagnostic scenarios are used to troubleshoot and correct potential problems on your system. They are part of the built-in diagnostic infrastructure and do not require user configuration or maintenance.

Scenario Event Mapper

The Scenario Event Mapper is used to correlate system events with relevant diagnostic scenarios.

Reliability Analysis Component

The Reliability Analysis Component provides information to Reliability Monitor that is used to calculate the System Stability Index. The System Stability Index is a number from 1 (least stable) to 10 (most stable) and is a weighted measurement derived from the number of specified failures seen over a rolling historical period. Reliability Events in the System Stability Report describe the specific failures.

Restart Manager

Restart Manager is a set of operating system application programming interfaces (APIs) used to detect, shut down, and restart applications and services that are using resources needed by installation or upgrade programs. These installation and update programs can use the Restart Manager API to avoid requiring a system restart after making changes to an application or to the operating system.

Resource Exhaustion Prevention

Windows Resource Exhaustion Detection and Resolution (RADAR) is part of the Diagnostic Policy service. RADAR includes three components:

  • Resource Exhaustion Detector detects when memory resources are approaching critically low levels.
  • Resource Exhaustion Resolver notifies you of the three top resource consumers so that you can take action by shutting one or more of these applications down to increase resource availability.
  • In Windows Vista, Memory Leak Diagnoser provides information about applications that might have memory leaks.

RADAR monitors memory commit charge, identifying when the commit charge is approaching the upper limit of virtual memory. If applications are allowed to consume all of the available system memory and virtual memory, the system might become unresponsive and applications might be unable to complete their tasks.