Using Machine Learning Analytics to Deliver Service Levels
September 21, 2016

Jerry Melnick
SIOS Technology

Share this

While the layers of abstraction created in virtualized environments afford numerous advantages, they can also obscure how the virtual resources are best allocated and how physical resources are performing. This can make maintaining optimal application performance a never-ending exercise in trial-and-error.

This post highlights some of the challenges encountered when using traditional monitoring and analytics tools, and describes how machine learning, as a next-generation analytics platform, provides a better way to meet SLAs by finding and fixing issues before they become performance problems. A future post will describe how machine learning analytics can also be used to allocate resources for optimal performance and cost-saving efficiency.

Most IT departments identify performance problems with tools that monitor a variety of discrete events against preset thresholds. For example they set a specific threshold for CPU utilization. Whenever that threshold is exceeded, the tool fires off alerts. But the use of thresholds presents several challenges. They do not account for the interrelated nature of resources in virtualized environments, where a change to or in one can have a significant impact on another. Such interrelationships exist both within and across silos. Without a complete understanding of the environment across silos, users of threshold-based tools frequently discover that their attempts to solve a problem have simply moved it to a different silo.

Thresholds often generate "alert storms" of meaningless data and miss important correlations that might indicate a severe problem exists. They are ineffective in detecting the symptoms of subtle issues that may indicate a significant imminent problem such as "noisy neighbors" or datastore latency issues. These subtle issues may not exceed a threshold related to the root cause or may exceed a threshold in short, random intervals, producing alerts that are frequently lost amid the "noise" of alert storms.

Even the so-called dynamic thresholds cannot accommodate the constant change in dynamic environments and, as a result, require significant ongoing IT intervention. And finally, while they may alert IT to an issue, they rarely provide sufficiently actionable information for resolving it. The exponential growth in the size and complexity of virtual environments has outstripped the ability of IT staff to set, manage, and continuously adjust threshold-based tools effectively. The time for an automated solution has come.

Advanced machine learning-based analytics software overcomes these and other challenges by continuously learning the many complex behaviors and interactions among interrelated objects – CPU, storage, network, applications – across the infrastructure. Unlike threshold-based solutions, this growing knowledge enables machine learning-based IT analytics solutions to provide a highly accurate means of identifying the root cause(s) of performance problems and making specific recommendations for resolving them cost-effectively.

This ability to aggregate, normalize, and then correlate and analyze hundreds of thousands of data points from different monitoring and management systems enable machine learning analytics solutions to transform massive volumes of data into meaningful insights across applications, servers and hosts, and storage and network infrastructures.

As it gathers and analyzes this wealth of data, the MLA system learns what constitutes normal behaviors, and it is this baseline that gives the system the ability to detect anomalies and find root causes automatically.

In addition to identifying root causes, advance machine learning based analytics solutions are able to simulate and predict the impact of making certain changes in resources and their allocations, which can be particularly useful for optimizing resource utilization and planning for expansion. This capability can also be useful for assessing if there is adequate capacity to handle a partial or complete failover. And these are topics worthy of a deeper dive in a future post.

Jerry Melnick is President and CEO of SIOS Technology.

Jerry Melnick is President and CEO of SIOS Technology
Share this

The Latest

November 13, 2024

AI sure grew fast in popularity, but are AI apps any good? ... If companies are going to keep integrating AI applications into their tech stack at the rate they are, then they need to be aware of AI's limitations. More importantly, they need to evolve their testing regiment ...

November 12, 2024

If you were lucky, you found out about the massive CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage last July by reading about it over coffee. Those less fortunate were awoken hours earlier by frantic calls from work ... Whether you were directly affected or not, there's an important lesson: all organizations should be conducting in-depth reviews of testing and change management ...

November 08, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 11, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) ...

November 07, 2024

On average, only 48% of digital initiatives enterprise-wide meet or exceed their business outcome targets according to Gartner's annual global survey of CIOs and technology executives ...

November 06, 2024

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping industries around the world. From optimizing business processes to unlocking new levels of innovation, AI is a critical driver of success for modern enterprises. As a result, business leaders — from DevOps engineers to CTOs — are under pressure to incorporate AI into their workflows to stay competitive. But the question isn't whether AI should be adopted — it's how ...

November 05, 2024

The mobile app industry continues to grow in size, complexity, and competition. Also not slowing down? Consumer expectations are rising exponentially along with the use of mobile apps. To meet these expectations, mobile teams need to take a comprehensive, holistic approach to their app experience ...

November 04, 2024

Users have become digital hoarders, saving everything they handle, including outdated reports, duplicate files and irrelevant documents that make it difficult to find critical information, slowing down systems and productivity. In digital terms, they have simply shoved the mess off their desks and into the virtual storage bins ...

November 01, 2024

Today we could be witnessing the dawn of a new age in software development, transformed by Artificial Intelligence (AI). But is AI a gateway or a precipice? Is AI in software development transformative, just the latest helpful tool, or a bunch of hype? To help with this assessment, DEVOPSdigest invited experts across the industry to comment on how AI can support the SDLC. In this epic multi-part series to be posted over the next several weeks, DEVOPSdigest will explore the advantages and disadvantages; the current state of maturity and adoption; and how AI will impact the processes, the developers, and the future of software development ...

October 31, 2024

Half of all employees are using Shadow AI (i.e. non-company issued AI tools), according to a new report by Software AG ...

October 30, 2024

On their digital transformation journey, companies are migrating more workloads to the cloud, which can incur higher costs during the process due to the higher volume of cloud resources needed ... Here are four critical components of a cloud governance framework that can help keep cloud costs under control ...