Ranking the importance of alerts for problem determination in large computer systems

The complexity of large computer systems has raised unprecedented challenges for system management. In practice, operators often collect large volume of monitoring data from system components and set up many rules to check data and trigger alerts. However, the alerts from various rules usually have different problem reporting accuracy because their thresholds are often manually set based on operators’ experience and intuition. Meantime, due to system dependencies, a single problem may trigger many alerts at the same time in large systems and the critical question is which alert should be analyzed first in the following problem determination process. In this paper, we propose a novel peer review mechanism to rank the importance of alerts and the top ranked alerts are more likely to be true positives. After comparing a metric value against its threshold to generate alerts, we also compare the value with the equivalent thresholds from many other rules to determine the importance of alerts. Our approach is evaluated with a real test bed system and experimental results are also included to demonstrate its effectiveness.