Patent ID: 8264702

Claim:
A method for determining the root cause of problems of members in a fleet of multi-function devices, comprising: capturing high frequency data with respect to a state of a multi-function device associated with a multi-function device cloud in order to thereafter store said data in a database accessible by said multi-function device, by executing a program instruction in a data-processing system; acquiring said high frequency data in association with a configurable heartbeat and in response to at least one event with a high cadence and fine granularity, by executing a program instruction in a data-processing system; and periodically and frequently analyzing said high frequency data stored in association with said multi-function device cloud utilizing a distributed data mining module to rapidly determine a root cause of at least one difficult to detect problem, wherein said distributed data mining module is associated with said multi-function device cloud, by executing a program instruction in a data-processing system.