Patent ID: 8555112

Claim:
A method of estimating a candidate cause in a failure occurred in an information processing apparatus by a computer, the method comprising: retrieving, by the computer, a first set of incident information from a data storage region on the basis of failure symptom data which is set on the computer, the data storage region storing incident information, each piece of incident information including failure symptom data, first cause data of a positive judgment result of a cause in the failure, and second cause data of a negative judgment result of the cause in the failure, each of the first set including failure symptom data identical to the set failure symptom data; extracting, by the computer, a second set of incident information from the first set on the basis of cause data which is set on the computer, each piece of the second set including the second cause data identical to the set cause data; and outputting, by the computer, the first cause data included in the second set as candidate cause data.