Many Flies in One Swat: Automated Categorization of Performance Problem Diagnosis Results

As the importance of application performance grows in modern enterprise systems, many organizations employ application performance management (APM) tools to help them deal with potential performance problems during production. In addition to monitoring capabilities, these tools provide problem detection and alerting. In large enterprise systems these tools can report a very large number of performance problems. They have to be dealt with individually, in a time-consuming and error-prone manual process, even though many of them have a common root cause. In this vision paper, we propose using automatic categorization for dealing with large numbers of performance problems reported by APM tools. This leads to the aggregation of reported problems, reducing the work required for resolving them. Additionally, our approach opens the possibility of extending the analysis approaches to use this information for a more efficient diagnosis of performance problems.