IT event grouping is the practice of grouping related IT events into a single event to help IT administrators more easily identify, diagnose and resolve problems in cloud environments. As such, IT event grouping is a core function of Information Technology Service Intelligence (ITSI) software, and key to incident intelligence activities.
An event is any instance of data that indicates a state change in the cloud environment, such as a user login, an application error, an account lockout or any number of other system activities. A typical large-scale cloud environment produces a “storm” of thousands of events each day, and traditional IT tools don’t provide any insights into the underlying issues behind them. As a result, event storms can make it exceedingly difficult for IT teams to determine which events are relevant and to discover relationships between them. That often leads to multiple tickets, duplicate investigations and fragmented information about the problem in question.
To overcome these challenges, cloud monitoring solutions employ a technique called IT event correlation, which automates the process of collecting, grouping and analyzing infrastructure events. It identifies relationships between the events to detect problems and uncover their root cause. As a result, it effectively enables IT teams to see through event storms to the underlying causes of events and then determine how to fix them.
In the following sections, we’ll look at how event grouping works to make it easier to identify patterns in cloud infrastructure data. We’ll also look at the benefits and challenges of event grouping and how you can get started using this practice in your organization.
What Is IT Event Grouping? | Contents
What is an IT event group?
An IT event group is an association of related events. After a user runs an initial search of event data collected by a cloud monitoring tool, they can group the results into event patterns to display a smaller subset of events that share characteristics. Each of these events can then be classified as a particular type of event, and all of them can be grouped into a single event.
Consolidating an event into the event group around the same issue is critical for correlating cloud infrastructure data to quickly identify and resolve problems in the environment.
How does IT event grouping work?
IT event grouping works by using algorithms and machine learning to sort and group similar events together, which are indexed by cloud performance monitoring tools. Users can search for specific types of events and classify them using a categorization system called “event types,” which let you sift through large amounts of data to identify related events.
For example, if you save a particular search as an event type named “successful_purchase,” any event returned by that search gets “eventtype=successful_purchase” added to it at search time.
Related events then can be grouped into a single event called a transaction. Transactions can include different events from the same source and the same host, different events from different sources from the same host, or similar events from different hosts and different sources.
Transactions returned from a search consist of the raw text of each event, the shared event types and the field values. For example, a user may run a search that groups together all of the web pages a single user or client IP address looked at over a specific period. This search takes events from the access logs and creates a transaction from events that share the same client IP value that occurred within five minutes of each other within a three-hour time span: “sourcetype=access_combined | transaction clientip maxpause=5m maxspan=3h.”
How are event groups used to correlate events?
Event groups make it easier to correlate machine data produced by a cloud environment in an effort to troubleshoot system and service problems. This is important because cloud IT infrastructures produce enormous volumes of data in a variety of formats that are challenging to analyze.
Event grouping is part of a monitoring technique called IT event correlation, enabled by ITSI tools called event correlators. Monitoring data gathered across the environment is automatically fed into the correlator. Machine learning algorithms analyze the data, identify similarities and consolidate it into groups around the same issue. These groups are then compared to data about system changes and network topology to uncover the root cause of performance problems and their solutions.
Event correlation processes event data in the following steps:
Through the process of event correlation, event grouping helps organize IT events for easier infrastructure management, authentication, troubleshooting and optimization. Most tools allow users to correlate different types of events into the following categories:
Grouping events into categories helps organizations with infrastructure management, authentication, troubleshooting and optimization.
How do you view patterns in IT event grouping?
You can easily view IT event grouping patterns and event details by performing event pattern analysis in your ITSI tool, often by using a specific search string. You can then use event pattern analysis to see the most common kinds of events in that dataset and create event lists.
Event correlation tools usually include a pattern identification function as part of their user interface. Clicking on a Patterns function or tab, for example, would trigger a secondary search on a subset of the current search results, with each pattern representing a set of events that share a similar structure. You can click on a pattern to:
How do you monitor IT event groups?
A group of events is monitored with an ITSI solution. These software tools employ artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that apply grouping algorithms to help IT managers and administrators monitor complex cloud environments with the primary goal of predicting and preventing service disruptions.
ITSI tools collect and analyze event logs from across cloud IT environments. Machine learning algorithms process the data to identify patterns and trends in network activity that could result in service degradation or downtime. Then ITSI produces alerts to prompt IT teams to take corrective action.
ITSI tools typically follow a four-step process:
Comprehensive IT monitoring follows a four-step process that includes data collection, analysis, prediction and action.
Event grouping and correlation is a core feature of ITSI software. As the ITSI tool ingests infrastructure data in the form of monitoring alerts, it uses machine learning to recognize meaningful patterns and relationships within it. IT teams can use these insights to identify and resolve incidents and outages, ultimately improving the availability and stability of their IT environment.
What are the benefits of IT event grouping?
IT event grouping offers several benefits:
How does IT event grouping support incident response?
An IT event grouping tool uses a real-time machine learning model to identify and create patterns quickly and accurately from the incident data it receives, as well as process and cluster data on each service.
With the exponential rise of data in the enterprise that has increased complexity and expanded scale of systems, IT departments face tougher challenges in designing alerts that convey adequate information for a response or that can effectively correlate various incidents and events. Enormous volumes of data and noise often make it difficult to map dependencies and resulting responses. Consequently, multiple teams often receive notifications for multiple services sourced to just one alert — in turn creating more chaos and unnecessarily funneling personnel and resources away from other critical tasks.
An IT event grouping tool, however, can address these challenges. The algorithm determines which, if any, alerts should be grouped into existing incidents, with the ability to adapt over time to understand new types of alerts as they evolve and corresponding human response behavior. This in turn gives IT analysts and professionals the ability to prioritize the most serious issues, and address and remediate them.
IT event grouping also gives an organization a broader picture of the incidents it regularly deals with, enabling the organization to streamline efforts and develop strategies to tackle the biggest issues over time.
How does efficient IT event grouping boost MTTR?
Efficient IT event grouping boosts MTTR by reducing confusion around and streamlining the investigation of infrastructure performance issues and incidents. IT teams achieve a clearer and more comprehensive picture of their cloud environment, which helps them pinpoint and resolve problems more quickly.
Cloud infrastructures routinely produce huge volumes of events about state changes within the environment, some of which indicate potential or active problems. Traditional IT monitoring tools provide alerts for all of these events but without any context into the root cause or why they are happening, leading to a general atmosphere of confusion. This fragmented and incomplete information can extend to MTTR, potentially resulting in prolonged downtime and higher costs.
IT event grouping reduces this noise by grouping similar events together, consolidating duplicate events, and focusing on key event groups. This makes it easier for teams to determine which events are relevant and allows them to focus on those that are most significant.
What are the challenges that IT event grouping addresses?
Grouping events addresses a number of common monitoring challenges. Some common ones include:
Fortunately, there are several different ways to group events. Each of these challenges can be solved with specific event grouping “recipes” supported by your ITSI software.
What tools can be used in IT event grouping?
IT event grouping requires the use of cloud performance monitoring tools that can continuously ingest and process infrastructure data. Each of the major cloud providers offers a performance monitoring toolset for its particular platform, as well as accompanying tutorials and informational docs. There are also third-party tools and templates that integrate with multiple cloud service providers. Popular options include Amazon CloudWatch, Microsoft Cloud Monitoring and Google Cloud Monitoring.
How do you get started with IT event grouping?
To get started with IT event grouping, you’ll need a cloud performance monitoring or ITSI tool. Some factors to consider when selecting a solution include:
Complex cloud environments produce an unwieldy amount of data, and traditional IT tools don’t provide the necessary context to make sense of it. Event grouping helps IT teams see through the storm by reducing the noise and surfacing the most critical issues that require attention. It is an essential technique for effective performance management and for providing your customers with the high-service availability they expect.