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Using Machine Learning Analytics to Deliver Service Levels

Jerry Melnick

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.

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As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

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IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

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2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

Using Machine Learning Analytics to Deliver Service Levels

Jerry Melnick

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.

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...