Associating a sequence of fault events with a maintenance activity based on a reduction in seasonality

An event management apparatus comprising:

• a processor coupled to a memory, the processor configured to:
• identify a sequence of fault events as a seasonal fault, and to calculate an initial seasonality metric indicating a degree of seasonality of the sequence of fault events in the processing system, wherein identifying a sequence of fault events as a seasonal fault comprises extracting from fault events identifiers of faulty hardware or software entities and associating together fault events in relation to a same entity;
• identify one or more maintenance windows;
• identify a subset of the sequence of the fault events which correspond in time with the maintenance windows;
• calculate a compensated seasonality metric for the sequence of fault events minus at least one of the subset of fault events, and based on determining that the compensated seasonality metric indicates a reduction in seasonality compared with the initial seasonality metric, generate an indication that the sequence of fault events is associated with maintenance activity.

A computer program product for managing events in a data processing system, the computer program product comprising a computer readable storage medium having program instructions embodied therewith, the program instructions executable by the data processing system to cause the data processing system to perform a method comprising:

• identifying a sequence of fault events as a seasonal fault in the processing system, wherein identifying a sequence of fault events as a seasonal fault comprises extracting from fault events identifiers of faulty hardware or software entities and associating together fault events in relation to a same entity;
• calculating an initial seasonality metric indicating a degree of seasonality of the sequence of fault events;
• identifying one or more maintenance windows;
• identifying a subset of the sequence of the fault events which correspond in time with the maintenance windows;
• calculating a compensated seasonality metric for the sequence of fault events minus at least one of the subset of fault events;
• and
• based on determining that the compensated seasonality metric indicates a reduction in seasonality compared with the initial seasonality metric, generating an indication that the sequence of fault events is associated with maintenance activities.