Patent ID: 8073946

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for finding causes of a latency degradation in an application running on a distributed computing system, the method comprising: identifying a set of variables associated with the application and the distributed computing system, the set of variables including variables that are candidates for being responsible for latency degradation in the application or computing system; dividing a total latency into two or more latency components, wherein each latency component corresponds to a particular aspect of the total application latency; dividing each latency component into two or more study classes, wherein each study class includes a subset of the variables that are candidates for being responsible for latency degradation for the latency component; and for each study class: generating one or more combinations of the variables in the subset of the variables for that study class; determining a latency distribution for each of the one or more combinations of the variables; comparing, by at least one processor, the determined latency distributions for the one or more combinations with corresponding latency benchmark values for the same combinations to determine whether a degradation in latency distributions has occurred for particular combinations among the one or more combinations; and providing a result of the comparison to a user.