Predictive Analytics to Assist with IT Operations Management for a Data Center Provider

Global Data Center Provider Seeks to Forecast Incidents and Generate Trend Reports

Trianz was approached by one of the world’s largest data center and co-location service providers. The company provides fast compute services for application performance, low latency network routes worldwide, and a digital ecosystem of financial, content, media, and enterprise cloud networking services.

Business Challenges for the Global Data Center Provider

The client lacked visibility into problematic infrastructure components as part of its IT operations management strategy. This meant it could not gain any insight necessary to guide infrastructure capacity expansion plans with its current monitoring solution.

In action, this led to a high number of IT incidents which negatively impacted business service availability. It also could not proactively forecast incidents and event trends, leading to a reactive remediation approach that lowered overall service quality.

How Did Trianz Approach the Predictive Analytics Project?

Trianz conducted workshops with business and IT stakeholders to understand critical inter-departmental challenges relating to IT operations management and infrastructure visibility.

Sample data was then collated from numerous monitoring tools to provide insight on how to configure the new predictive analytics solution.

Data preparation took place alongside data cleansing within a Proof-of-Concept environment, showing the value of the new predictive analytics solution ready for stakeholder approval.

Then, three statistical models were created—ARIMA, Negative Binomial and Zero Inflation — to assist the client when predicting IT operations management incidents.

Next, data correlations were formed based on the Pearson Correlation Coefficient to derive linear relations between each cloud IT system.

Kaggle was then integrated with Microsoft PowerBI to enable interactive and visual dashboards that could be accessed on desktop and mobile.

Finally, the completed solution was presented to key stakeholders across the business.

Transformational Effects for the Global Data Center Provider

Following this initiative, the global data center provider could forecast incidents and generate trend reports relating to IT operations management processes on its global server network.

It could also proactively forecast disk usage, network utilization, and memory usage when planning capacity expansions on its network.

Network events and IT incidents were continuously analyzed to generate patterns and trends, providing visibility and insight for future IT network improvements and mitigation efforts.

Finally, incident and event correlation offered unprecedented insight into the relationships between servers, networking equipment, software, and other areas.