Data trends for quick analysis

A trend is a recurring pattern and trend analysis is the practice of analyzing the monitored data to identify these patterns. When the user needs are changing rapidly, trend analysis helps you to assess the current situation and predict the future.

Data providers for BMC Helix AIOps

Roles and permissions

On the Overview page, you can view the trend for the following Key Performance Indicator (KPI) widgets:

Event count
Incident count
Noise reduction
Anomaly event count
Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)

The trend shows the increase or decrease of a value for the selected time range as shown in the following example images:

An increasing trend is represented using the up arrow:

A decreasing trend is represented using the down arrow.

How to derive insights from data trends?

Trends signify changes over time on the performance indicators and entities as explained below:

An increasing event count and anomaly event count trend indicate that there are issues in the monitoring environment that need to be addressed.
An increasing trend for the noise reduction value indicates that there are a lot of similar events getting raised for a single issue. This indicates an increase in events that have been correlated, which could mean that a specific situation is worsening as the event generation rate increases. A steady-state of event generation contributing to a situation over a period of time will not show an increasing trend.
An increasing trend for MTTR indicates that the time taken to resolve a problem is taking more time compared to the previous issues in your monitored environment, which may indicate the presence of many possibilities such as:

Delay in root cause identification
Increased workload on resolver staff, which could be alleviated by implementing more automation.

An increasing trend in total incidents generated could be an indicator of systemic issues across the enterprise.

Trend value computation

Consider the Total Events KPI example to understand the trend value computation. The trend value is computed to indicate how the number of events in the current period under observation deviates from the total number of events.

T = Current time period

N2 = Number of events that occurred in current time period

N1 = Number of events that occurred in previous time period.

The number of events up to now over the total time period (2T) is used as a baseline. The trend is the percentage that the number of events in the current time period (N2 - N1) deviates from the number of events in the total time period (N2 + N1) multiplied by 100. The trend is expressed as a percentage, and is calculated as:

Example

Consider the following example to understand how the trend value is calculated:

Calculate the event trend if you have selected the time range as Last 4 hours on the Overview page.

Time range = T = Last 4 hours

Current time = 5:00 pm

Event count for the current period = N2 = 412

Event count for the previous period = N1 = 349

Trend value in percentage is:

Data trends for quick analysis

Trend value computation

Example

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