In a self-healing system, autonomic managers monitor managed resources and must be able to initiate actions in response to problems that arise that might affect normal operation. These actions can be defined as business policies, but the problem must first be identified from a potentially large set of messages. In addition, these messages might not even be in compatible formats. To address these issues, the problem determination architecture has standardized on a single message format: the Common Base Event. (There's even a best practices guide for using the Common Base Event format and a wiki on those practices.)
