Patent ID: 8463899

Claim:
A root cause analysis optimization method, comprising: at a performance monitoring system, identifying a primary alarm metric and one or more probable cause metrics involved in producing a list of root cause analysis (RCA) candidates, wherein each of the RCA candidates is associated with an RCA score that indicates a level of correlation between each RCA candidate and the primary alarm metric; determining data points to use from the primary alarm metric and each probable cause metric based on an alarm time of the primary alarm metric; validating the data points between the primary alarm metric and each probable cause metric to remove discrepancies by aligning the data points in time to compute a correlation coefficient; applying a data correlation algorithm to the validated data points to compute the correlation coefficient between primary and secondary aligned data points; calculating a confidence factor by computing a data point ratio between the primary and secondary aligned data points using actual data points and theoretical data points; adjusting the level of correlation of the validated data points by adjusting the correlation coefficient using the confidence factor including the data point ratio; adjusting the RCA scores of the RCA candidates based on the computed correlation coefficient including using the adjusted correlation coefficient; and presenting to a user an optimized RCA candidate list listing a fraction of the RCA candidates sorted based the adjusted RCA score.