Rule-based Problem Classification in IT Service Management

Problem management is a critical and expensive element for delivering IT service management and touches various levels of managed IT infrastructure. While problem management has been mostly, reactive, recent work is studying how to leverage large problem ticket information from similar IT infrastructures to probatively, predict the onset of problems. Because of the sheer size and complexity, of problem tickets, supervised learning algorithms have been the method of choice for problem ticket classification, relying on labeled (or pre-classified) tickets from one managed in frastructure to automatically, create signatures for similar infrastructures. However, where there are insufficient pre-classified data, leveraging human expertise to develop classification rules can be more efficient. In this paper, we describe a rule-based crowdsourcing approach, where experts can author classification rules and a social networking-based platform (called xPad) is used to socialize and execute these rules by, large practitioner communities. Using real data sets from several large IT delivery, centers, we demonstrate that this approach balances between two key, criteria: accuracy, and cost effectiveness.