This document presents a survey about autonomic computing. Autonomic computing allows systems to manage themselves given the high-level objectives of administrators; it deals with computing systems complexity looking for replace the human intervention of systems administration. Since the autonomic term appeared in 2001, some works have been proposed about autonomic systems design, emergent properties of autonomic computing. One of these properties is self-healing which provides the ability to detect, identify and correct failures on a system. This is the research problem that we try to solve using an artificial life approach.