APM and the Detectives

Explore Featured Editorials (Apr 27 2012) Prelert Blog
by Rich Collier (Rcollier)

The Chicago Police Department turbocharged their detective work by putting in action an advanced pattern-recognition software system. Created by computer scientists at DePaul University, Classification System for Serial Criminal Patterns (CSSCP) uses artificial intelligence to cull massive amounts of data.

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Comment Mentions:   Prelert   Artificial Intelligence

AI and the Future of Application & Infrastructure Management

Explore Featured Editorials (Apr 4 2012)
by Kevin Conklin (Kevinconklin)

Gartner's Will Capelli has a new blog (AI in IAM) where he explores the role of artificial intelligence in Infrastructure and Application Management. In a recent post he points out the trend toward two tiered analytics. In the first tier application and infrastructure monitoring tools structure the data in the dimensions of time and relationship within the IT architecture.  In the second tier products like Prelert use predictive analysis and machine learning techniques to uncover behavior patterns that IT can use to improve operational efficiency and reduce service incidents.  With Will's usual flair, he relates this approach to ...

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Comment Mentions:   Prelert   Artificial Intelligence   Analytics

The Case of the SQL Stored Procedure Slowdown

Explore Featured Editorials (Feb 21 2012)
by Aoliveira

The combination of Prelert's advanced analytics and correlation capabilities with CA Introscope rich monitoring capabilities let users cut the time to finding the root cause of issues by 90%.  In a recent example, an Introscope administrator was trying to resolve an issue, in an unfamiliar application, resulting in a slowdown in a SQL stored procedure (> 200 seconds). The Introscope system was monitoring over 2700 unique metrics.  Prelert had narrowed this down to 24 metrics, which were directly related to the issue. Prelert's Activity View is a scrolling time window that allows the user to scroll back in time ...

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Comment Mentions:   Prelert   Root Cause   Analytics

No More 90 Minute Troubleshooting Calls for Credit Company

Explore Featured Editorials (Jan 18 2012) Prelert Blog
by Aoliveira

Introscope admins at a major credit bureau were frustrated over the typical 90 minutes they spent on conference calls just trying to figure out where to start the troubleshooting process.  They gave Prelert a chance by feeding it data from a recent incident where CPU utilization for the Websphere JVM process pegged at 100% for 30 minutes resulting in the restart of multiple services for a critical production app. Prelert’s intuitive dashboard (shown below) allowed the admins to go back in time to view anomalous activities related to the CPU utilization spike.  Prelert identified a web service that took ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Prelert   Troubleshooting

Prelert Drives Introscope Expansion at Large Bank

Explore Featured Editorials (Jan 17 2012)
by Scott

One of the Northeast’s largest regional banks had only deployed Introscope on half of its on-line banking environment.  Support teams were not leveraging Introscope’s rich data and the application architects were advocating pulling Introscope out of the environment due to a lack of use.  Prelert became involved to help the bank solve business risk issue they'd been struggling with for 11 months. Their fault tolerant design of their on-line banking environment involved a backup datacenter. Unfortunately, each time they'd tested the failover, the application would gradually degrade and then crash.  Prelert was fed 3 days of ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Prelert   Artificial Intelligence   Analytics

Do Moneyball Style Analytics Work for APM?

Explore Featured Editorials (Nov 17 2011) Editor's Spotlight
by Rich Collier (Rcollier)

Perhaps one of the best quotes from the book (and movie) Moneyball is "we aren't allowing ourselves to be victimized by what we see". In other words, the premise (and promise) of Sabermetrics is that analytics can yield results that may not otherwise be obvious. Humans aren't inherently good at statistics, so analytics can supplement what the human cannot easily do. And, if you've read the book, seen the movie, or have at least casually watched baseball in the last few years, you may have noticed that having a massive payroll and star players does not guarantee ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   APM   Analytics

Gartner: Machines make better decisions than humans

Explore Featured Editorials (Oct 24 2011)
by Kevin Conklin (Kevinconklin)

Are we nearing the day when machines replace middle management decision makers? Gartner analyst Nigel Rayner argues that people rely too much on hunch, experience, relationships and financial incentives ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   IBM   Prelert   Analytics

Is Your IT Shop Really Any Better than RIM’s?

Explore Featured Editorials (Oct 17 2011)
by Kevin Conklin (Kevinconklin)

Days into its Blackberry outage RIM's CTO admits that they still don’t know what caused the crash.  But RIM may be only the most recent symptom of a spreading crisis in the world of cloud-based services... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   IBM   Prelert   Microsoft

Can Big Data Analytics Prevent Application Outages?

Explore Featured Editorials (Sep 22 2011)
by Kevin Conklin (Kevinconklin)

If Amazon, Bank of America and Microsoft can’t contain service outages, the rest of us have much to fear.  Research indicates average recovery times between 4 and 72 hrs...  (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Amazon   Analytics

How 9/11 Gave Birth to New Application Performance Technology

Explore Featured Editorials (Sep 14 2011)
by Kevin Conklin (Kevinconklin)

In the days after September 11, 2001, it became apparent that the pattern recognition technologies that the United States used to fight terrorism were woefully inadequate for contemporary threats.  Finding the needle in the haystack depended on identifying patterns of such features.  Pattern recognition technologies are making their debut in application performance management. (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Prelert   Application Performance Management

@VMware: Got Your Head in the Cloud on App Performance?

Explore Featured Editorials (Sep 6 2011)
by Kevin Conklin (Kevinconklin)

Listening to Paul Maritz’s keynote at VMworld last week, it seemed virtualization is the key to all of our IT concerns. Did you know it will replace all your mainframes, Linux and Unix boxes and your PCs as well? And don’t worry about the apps that run on all that equipment says Maritz, it’s all going to be in a virtualized cloud soon enough. Apparently VMware now have their sights set on replacing mainframes, mid-range systems, UNIX, Linux, and PCs.  There vision is that we will all rely on apps and data hosted in a virtualized cloud ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Application Performance Management   APM   Virtualization

Are Fed Statements Related to Searches for Nausea-Remedies?

Explore Featured Editorials (Aug 30 2011)
by Rcollier

I came across an interesting experimental service from Google called "Google Correlate". In a nutshell, you can use the tool to see if arbitrary items correlate well against the other. One of the examples demonstrated (with a dose of tongue-in-cheek humor) is a correlation between the Federal Reserve's balance sheet and the number of Google searches on "nausea remedies".  They do indeed correlate well and one might, therefore, assume there is a relationship. But only until you realize that the correlation to the Google search “how to get over a guy” actually correlates better. We often see a deeper ... (Read Full Article)

Comment Mentions:   Google   Application Performance Management   APM