Storage Alerting Mechanism Combining Thresholds and Seasonality
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current storage system monitoring systems generate a high volume of false alerts due to numerous thresholds, overwhelming administrators and causing genuine alerts to be overlooked, as not all threshold breaches indicate serious issues.
Innovation Solution
A smarter performance alerting mechanism that combines thresholds with historical seasonality analysis, where alerts are only generated if storage system metrics breach both performance thresholds and calculated seasonality boundaries, reducing noise and increasing alert accuracy by identifying anomalies.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If numerous thresholds are set for monitoring storage system metrics, then monitoring coverage is improved, but false alert volume increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent changes the parameter of alert generation from simple threshold breach to a composite evaluation considering both threshold breach and seasonality boundaries. By introducing seasonal boundaries as an additional parameter, the system distinguishes between normal seasonal variations and genuine anomalies, thereby reducing false alerts while maintaining comprehensive monitoring coverage
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces seasonality boundaries as an intermediary layer between raw metric data and alert generation. This intermediary component analyzes historical seasonal patterns and creates dynamic boundaries that mediate the decision-making process, filtering out false alerts caused by normal seasonal variations while preserving alerts for genuine issues
2Loss of information
If alerts are generated for every threshold breach, then alert completeness is improved, but administrator workload increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent modifies the alert generation parameters by adding seasonality boundary evaluation to the existing threshold check. This parameter enhancement allows the system to maintain alert completeness for genuine issues while filtering out noise, thereby reducing administrator workload without sacrificing important alert information
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements a feedback mechanism where historical alert data and seasonal patterns are continuously analyzed to refine seasonality boundaries. This feedback loop improves the accuracy of alert filtering over time, ensuring that genuine alerts remain complete while progressively reducing false alert workload for administrators
Data Source
AI summary
A storage system management application receives reports describing operation of a storage system from a performance monitoring system, and compares the storage system operating metrics against a set of respective thresholds. If the metrics breach one or more thresholds, the seasonality boundaries for the respective metric are calculated, and an alert is only generated if the storage system operating metric is both outside the performance threshold and outside of the calculated seasonality boundaries. By determining the seasonality boundaries and using the seasonality boundaries to determine when to generate alerts, it is possible to reduce the number of alerts generated. By including the seasonality values in the alerts, the deviation from normal seasonably operating conditions can be determined from the alert, thus enabling a person who receives the alert to determine the magnitude of deviation of the storage system operation from seasonably adjusted normal operation.