Workflow Extraction for Service Operation Using Multiple Unstructured Trouble Tickets

Akio WATANABE  Keisuke ISHIBASHI  Tsuyoshi TOYONO  Keishiro WATANABE  Tatsuaki KIMURA  Yoichi MATSUO  Kohei SHIOMOTO  Ryoichi KAWAHARA  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E101-D   No.4   pp.1030-1041
Publication Date: 2018/04/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
DOI: 10.1587/transinf.2017DAP0014
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Data Engineering and Information Management)
Category: 
Keyword: 
system management,  operation,  trouble ticket,  workflow,  multiple sequence alignment,  hidden markov model,  

Full Text: PDF(1.4MB)
>>Buy this Article

Summary: 
In current large-scale IT systems, troubleshooting has become more complicated due to the diversification in the causes of failures, which has increased operational costs. Thus, clarifying the troubleshooting process also becomes important, though it is also time-consuming. We propose a method of automatically extracting a workflow, a graph indicating a troubleshooting process, using multiple trouble tickets. Our method extracts an operator's actions from free-format texts and aligns relative sentences between multiple trouble tickets. Our method uses a stochastic model to detect a resolution, a frequent action pattern that helps us understand how to solve a problem. We validated our method using real trouble-ticket data captured from a real network operation and showed that it can extract a workflow to identify the cause of a failure.