IDENTIFYING TROUBLESHOOTING OPTIONS FOR RESOLVING NETWORK FAILURES

• US 20150271008A1
• Filed: 03/24/2014
• Published: 09/24/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 03/24/2014
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Jain, Navendu, Potharaju, Rahul
• Granted Patent: US 10,263,836 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/079 Root cause analysis, i.e. error or fault diagnosis in a hardware test environment G06F11/22; in a software test environment G06F11/36
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0654 using network fault recovery ring fault isolation or reconfiguration in loop networks without recovery actions by a network management system H04L12/437
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0661 by reconfiguring faulty entities
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0686 Additional information in the notification, e.g. enhancement of specific meta-data
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/069 using logs of notifications; Post-processing of notifications
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/0886 Fully automatic configuration
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/16 using machine learning or artificial intelligence

Abstract

Described herein are various technologies pertaining to providing assistance to an operator in a data center with respect to failures in the data center. An alarm is received, and a failing device is identified based upon content of the alarm. Failure conditions of the alarm are mapped to a failure symptom that may be exhibited by the failing device, and troubleshooting options previously employed to mitigate the failure symptom are retrieved from historical data. Labels are respectively assigned to the troubleshooting options, where a label is indicative of a probability that a troubleshooting option to which the label has been assigned will mitigate the failure symptom.

Claims

1. A method comprising:

receiving an alarm, the alarm comprising failure conditions that are indicative of a network failure;

responsive to receiving the alarm, accessing historical data, the historical data comprising a failure symptom of the network failure and troubleshooting options previously undertaken to mitigate the network failure;

mapping the failure conditions of the alarm to the failure symptom in the historical data;

responsive to mapping the failure conditions of the alarm to the failure symptom, identifying the troubleshooting options;

assigning respective labels to the troubleshooting options, the labels indicative of respective probabilities that the troubleshooting options will mitigate the failure symptom; and

outputting the plurality of troubleshooting options and their respective labels.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

receiving feedback from an operator that the failure symptom has been mitigated and that a first troubleshooting option in the troubleshooting options was employed to mitigate the failure symptom; and

updating the historical data based upon the feedback.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

responsive to receiving the alarm, identifying a failing device that causes the network failure, wherein the mapping of the failure conditions of the alarm to the failure symptom in the historical data is based upon the identifying of the failing device, and wherein the identifying of the troubleshooting options is based upon the identifying of the failing device.

4. The method of claim 3, the historical data comprises a device failure history table for the failing device, the device failure history table comprises failure symptoms previously exhibited by the failing device, the failure symptom is included in the failure symptoms previously exhibited by the failing device, and wherein the failure history table further comprises the troubleshooting options for the failure symptoms previously exhibited by the failing device.

5. The method of claim 3, the historical data comprises a device failure history table for a device that is on a same platform as the failing device, the device failure history table comprises failure symptoms previously exhibited by the device, and wherein the failure symptom is included in the failure symptoms previously exhibited by the device.

6. The method of claim 1 the historical data comprises a link failure history table that comprises data pertaining to historic failures of a link in the data center, and wherein the link failure history table comprises the failure symptom.

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

receiving a selection of a troubleshooting option from the troubleshooting options; and

responsive to receiving the selection of the troubleshooting option, displaying a debugging step, the debugging step comprising an instruction for resolving the network failure.

8. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

responsive to outputting the plurality of troubleshooting options and their respective labels, transmitting a signal to a device in the data center, the signal causing a troubleshooting option in the troubleshooting options to be performed without operator intervention.

9. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

responsive to receiving the alarm, correlating the alarm with a second alarm to represent the network failure; and

mapping the failure conditions of the alarm to the failure symptom in the historical data responsive to correlating the alarm with the second alarm.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein correlating the alarm with the second alarm is based upon at least one of an amount of time between when the alarm and the second alarm were generated, devices that respectively generated the alarm and the second alarm, types of the devices that respectively generated the alarm and the second alarm, or a number of hops between the devices that respectively generated the alarm.

11. The method of claim 1, further comprising computing the respective probabilities based upon a number of times that the troubleshooting options were indicated as being taken in the historical data and a number of times that the troubleshooting operations were indicated as successfully resolving respective network failures.

12. A resolution system that facilitates resolving network failures in data center, the resolution system comprising:

a processor; and

a memory that comprises a plurality of components that are executed by the processor, the plurality of components comprising;

an alarm receiver component that receives an alarm, the alarm indicative of a network failure in the data center; and

a resolution identifier component that, responsive to the alarm receiver component receiving the alarm, outputs troubleshooting options for resolving the network failure, the troubleshooting options having labels respectively assigned thereto that are indicative of confidences that the troubleshooting options, when performed by an operator of the data center, will resolve the network failure.

13. The resolution system of claim 12, the resolution identifier component determines the labels based upon operator feedback pertaining to the troubleshooting options.

14. The resolution system of claim 12, the alarm comprises failure conditions, the system further comprising a data store that comprises historical data, the historical data comprising a failure history table for a network device, the failure history table comprises a failure symptom exhibited by the network device, the resolution identifier component identifies the failure symptom in the failure history table based upon the failure condition of the alarm, and wherein the resolution identifier component outputs the troubleshooting options based upon the failure symptom being identified.

15. The resolution system of claim 14, the plurality of components further comprising a feedback component that receives feedback from the operator, the feedback indicating whether or not the operator successfully resolved the network failure by using the troubleshooting option, the feedback component updates the failure history table based upon the feedback.

16. The resolution system of claim 12, the alarm generated by a network infrastructure device, the network infrastructure device being one of a switch, a router, a re-router, a gateway, a hub, or a bridge.

17. The resolution system of claim 12, the resolution identifier component further outputs a debugging step that corresponds to a troubleshooting option in the troubleshooting options, the debugging step providing instructions to the operator to resolve the network failure.

18. The resolution system of claim 12, the resolution identifier component comprising a failure identifier component that identifies a failing device that causes the network failure, the failure identifier component identifies the failing device based upon the alarm, the resolution identifier component outputs data that is indicative of historical failure frequency of the failing device responsive to the failure identifier component identifying the failing device.

19. The resolution system of claim 18, the resolution identifier component outputs data that is indicative of historical failure frequency of the failing device relative to historic failure frequency of other devices in the data center responsive to the failure identifier component identifying the failing device.

20. A computer-readable storage medium comprising instructions that, when executed by a processor, cause the processor to perform acts comprising:

receiving an alarm, the alarm comprises failure conditions that are indicative of a network failure in a data center;

responsive to receiving the alarm, identifying a failing device that causes the network failure, the failing device identified based upon the failure conditions;

responsive to identifying the failing device, accessing a failure history table for the failing device, the failure history table comprises a failure symptom previously exhibited by the failing device and troubleshooting options previously employed to mitigate the troubleshooting symptom;

mapping the failure conditions of the alarm to the failure symptom in the failure history table;

retrieving the troubleshooting options responsive to the mapping of the failure conditions to the failure symptom; and

outputting the troubleshooting options and respective labels for the troubleshooting options, the labels indicative of respective confidences that the troubleshooting options, when employed by an operator, will mitigate the failure symptom.