a method , system and apparatus for server failure diagnosis and self - healing in a server farm . an autonomic server farm which has been configured in accordance with the inventive arrangements can include a multiplicity of servers enabled to respond to requests received from clients which are external to the server farm . a resource director such as an ip sprayer or a network dispatcher can be configured to route requests to selected ones of the servers , in accordance with resource allocation algorithms such as random , round - robin and least recently used . significantly , unlike conventional server farms whose management of failure diagnosis and self - healing relies exclusively upon the capabilities of the resource director , in the present invention , client - assisted failure detection logic can be coupled to the resource director so as to provide client - assisted management of failure diagnosis and self - healing .