STAR: A system for ticket analysis and resolution

Abstract

In large scale and complex IT service environments, a problematic incident is logged as a ticket and contains the ticket summary (system status and problem description). The system administrators log the step-wise resolution description when such tickets are resolved. The repeating service events are most likely resolved by inferring similar historical tickets. With the availability of reasonably large ticket datasets, we can have an automated system to recommend the best matching resolution for a given ticket summary. In this paper, we first identify the challenges in real-world ticket analysis and develop an integrated framework to eficiently handle those challenges. The framework first quantifies the quality of ticket resolutions using a regression model built on carefully designed features. The tickets, along with their quality scores obtained from the resolution quality quantification, are then used to train a deep neural network ranking model that outputs the matching scores of ticket summary and resolution pairs. This ranking model allows us to leverage the resolution quality in historical tickets when recommending resolutions for an incoming incident ticket. In addition, the feature vectors derived from the deep neural ranking model can be effectively used in other ticket analysis tasks, such as ticket classification and clustering. The proposed framework is extensively evaluated with a large real-world dataset.