How Machine Learning Can Improve IT Operations Data Center Knowledge

Bostjan Kaluza, Phd, is Chief Data Scientist at Evolven Software. IT operations teams often focus on more than one approach to infrastructure monitoring, such as device, network, server, application and storage, with the implication that the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. According to a 2015 Application Performance Monitoring survey, 65 percent of surveyed companies own more than 10 different monitoring tools. Despite the increase in instrumentation capabilities and the amount of collected data, enterprises barely use significantly larger data sets to improve availability and performance process effectiveness with root cause analysis and incident prediction. W. Cappelli (Gartner, October 2015) emphasizes in a recent report that "although availability and performance data volumes have increased by an order of magnitude over the last 10 years, enterprises find data in their possession insufficiently actionable … Root causes of performance problems have taken an average of 7 days to diagnose, compared to 8 days in 2005 and only 3 percent of incidents were predicted, compared to 2 percent in 2005".