Patent ID: 7383191

Claim:
A method for analyzing a potential cause of a change in a service, wherein service quality of the service is monitored, usage of the service is measured, and service events are detected, the method comprising: determining a service change time window based at least in part upon a change in service quality between a first working state and a second, non-working state, and upon a change in service usage amount, the service change time window encompassing at least part of a service outage; retrieving data representing a plurality of detected events and a-corresponding times in which the events occurred; computing a probability for each of the detected events that each of the detected events caused the service change based at least in part on a correlation between the event time and the service change time window; determining whether one or more other events of a type identical to one of the detected events occurred; and wherein computing the probability comprises computing the probability using at least in part a false occurrence weighting function which decreases the probability of the detected event as the cause of the service change for instances in which the detected event occurred outside the service change time window.