Resolution Recommendation for Event Tickets in Service Management

Abstract

In recent years, IT service providers have rapidly achieved an automated service delivery model. Software monitoring systems are designed to actively collect and signal event occurrences and, when necessary, automatically generate incident tickets. Repeating events generate similar tickets, which in turn have a vast number of repeated problem resolutions likely to be found in earlier tickets. In this paper, we develop techniques to recommend appropriate resolution for incoming events by making use of similarities between the events and historical resolutions of similar events. Built on the traditional k-nearest neighbor algorithm (KNN), our proposed algorithms take into account false positives often generated by monitoring systems. An additional penalty is incorporated into the algorithms to control the number of misleading resolutions in the recommendation results. Moreover, as the effectiveness of the KNN heavily relies on the underlying similarity measurement, we proposed two other approaches to significantly improve our recommendation with respect to resolution relevance. One approach uses topic-level features to incorporate resolution information into the similarity measurement; the other uses metric learning to learn a more effective similarity measure. Extensive empirical evaluations on three ticket data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed methods.