Self-Healing Maintenance Architecture for Firebird in Spring Boot

February 03, 2026

#1

After implementing predictive maintenance and intelligent scheduling, the final step is to make the system self-healing — capable of detecting, resolving, and recovering from failures automatically without manual intervention.
This transforms your Firebird and Spring Boot setup into a fully autonomous, resilient maintenance ecosystem.

1. What Is a Self-Healing System?

A self-healing system can:

• Detect anomalies in job execution or data health.
• Automatically apply fixes or fallback mechanisms.
• Restore operations with minimal human input.

This ensures consistent reliability even during network issues, data corruption, or performance spikes.

2. Define Healing Actions

Start by defining what “healing” means in your context. Examples:

• Re-running failed jobs.
• Restoring data from backup.
• Cleaning corrupted tables.
• Restarting hung connections.

You can manage these through a HealingService:

@Service
public class HealingService {

    @Autowired
    private MaintenanceLogRepository logRepo;

    public void reRunFailedJob(String jobName, Runnable jobTask) {
        System.out.println("Retrying failed job: " + jobName);
        try {
            jobTask.run();
            logRepo.save(new MaintenanceLog(jobName, "RECOVERED",
                    LocalDateTime.now(), "Job auto-recovered successfully."));
        } catch (Exception e) {
            logRepo.save(new MaintenanceLog(jobName, "RECOVERY_FAILED",
                    LocalDateTime.now(), e.getMessage()));
        }
    }

    public void restoreFromBackup(String backupFile) {
        System.out.println("♻ Restoring database from backup: " + backupFile);
        // Run a Firebird restore command or service call here
    }
}

3. Detect Failure Events

Integrate the healing service into the predictive pipeline:

@Component
public class SelfHealingManager {

    @Autowired
    private HealingService healingService;
    @Autowired
    private MaintenanceScheduler scheduler;

    @EventListener
    public void handleJobFailure(JobFailureEvent event) {
        System.out.println("⚠ Detected job failure: " + event.getJobName());
        healingService.reRunFailedJob(event.getJobName(), () -> {
            if ("Cleanup Job".equals(event.getJobName())) {
                scheduler.cleanAndArchiveLogs();
            }
        });
    }
}

This listener automatically reacts to failure events and triggers corrective actions immediately.

4. Emit Job Events

Create custom events for job success and failure to enable event-driven recovery:

public class JobFailureEvent extends ApplicationEvent {
    private final String jobName;

    public JobFailureEvent(Object source, String jobName) {
        super(source);
        this.jobName = jobName;
    }

    public String getJobName() { return jobName; }
}

Emit the event whenever a job fails:

@Autowired
private ApplicationEventPublisher eventPublisher;

catch (Exception e) {
    eventPublisher.publishEvent(new JobFailureEvent(this, "Cleanup Job"));
}

This keeps your architecture decoupled and reactive.

5. Self-Diagnosis and Reporting

Add a periodic health check for the entire Firebird instance:<

@Component
public class DatabaseHealthChecker {

    @Autowired
    private JdbcTemplate jdbcTemplate;

    @Scheduled(fixedRate = 60000)
    public void checkHealth() {
        try {
            jdbcTemplate.queryForObject("SELECT 1 FROM RDB$DATABASE", Integer.class);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            System.err.println("Firebird database not responding, attempting recovery...");
            // Trigger healing actions here, e.g., restart connection pool
        }
    }
}

This ensures your system can detect connection issues or slow responses early and act on them.

6. Healing Dashboard

Add a section in your dashboard to display recent healing actions and recovery outcomes: You can populate this table directly from your MaintenanceLog entries.