Technological advancement has helped us to work efficiently and increase productivity but at the same time it has also presented us with problem of increasing networks, complex architectures and momentous task of maintaining all this. The increase in complexity in the computation science world motivated IT field researchers to find new solution to resolve unmanageable complexity of the systems. One such solution for handling complexity based management task is Autonomic Computing. This paper provides thorough study of the existing state of the autonomic computing presenting its characteristics and their effects on management process of the system and its challenging issues