Assessing Operational Impact in Enterprise Systems by Mining Usage Patterns

Performing impact analysis involves determining which users are affected by system resource failures. Understanding when users are actually using certain resources allows system administrators to better assess the impact on enterprise operations. This is critical to prioritizing system repair and restoration actions, and allowing users to modify their plans proactively. We present an approach that combines traditional dependency analysis with resource usage information to improve the operational relevance of these assessments. Our approach collects data from end-user systems using common operating system commands, and uses this data to generate dependency and usage pattern information. We tested our approach in a computer lab running applications at various levels of complexity, and demonstrate how our framework can be used to assist system administrators in providing clear and concise impact assessments to executive managers.