The concept of e-infrastructure has brought together network, systems, and application management into a common management model. Root-cause analysis is reshaping the network management market. While pundits debate how to define it, it's typically considered the isolation of a point of failure. This could be a network device, an application, a server, or any component of these elements. Events include a wide range of phenomena across the networked infrastructure, including those with time sensitivity relevant to performance.
Event correlation is one means of achieving root-cause analysis, but it's only part of the answer.
Root cause technologies appeared in the 1990s, along with platforms, and had the potential to make platforms meaningful. If you could deploy an advanced correlation engine to work across a sea of red lights fed from a variety of devices and other managed entities, a platform might become something other than a convenient launching pad. The main problem was execution. The development burden is now shifting from the user to the vendor, enabling more self-adaptive products. The vendor's goal is to model details relevant to new devices, or new applications and application components, to keep up with new devices and software.