Toward Quantifying System Manageability

Manageability directly influences a system's reliability, availability, security, and safety, thus being a key ingredient of system dependability. Alas, we do not have today a good way to measure manageability or reason quantitatively about it, and this is a major hindrance in improving systems' ease of management. In this paper, we propose a manageability metric that aims to be objective, intuitive, and broadly applicable. We hope such a metric will help software developers make the right design tradeoffs and will also foster fair competition on the basis of manageability. We also offer preliminary thoughts on incorporating this metric into a benchmark.