Retrieving relevant reports from a customer engagement repository

Customers of modern enterprise applications commonly engage the vendor of the application for on-site troubleshooting and fine tuning of large deployments. The results of these engagements are documented in customer engagement reports. The reports contain valuable information about the observed symptoms, identified problems, attempted workarounds and the final solution. Such information is valuable in supporting analysts in future engagements. Engagement reports are stored in a customer engagement repository. Retrieving relevant reports from such a repository is usually ad-hoc and is based on using basic text search. We present a technique to retrieve relevant reports from an engagement repository. The technique takes as input an execution log for a particular deployment and retrieves relevant engagement reports. The technique identifies relevant reports by comparing execution logs attached to the report stored in the engagement repository. The technique returns two types of relevant reports: (1) reports for engagement with similar operational profiles to identify prior engagements with similar workloads and (2) reports for engagement with similar signature profiles to identify prior engagements with similar problems. Using our technique, support analysts can locate relevant engagement reports and use the knowledge in them to quickly resolve problems at hand. To demonstrate the feasibility of our technique, we present two case studies: one case study uses an industry standard open source application, the Dell DVD Store, while the other case study uses a large enterprise application. The results of our case study show that our technique performs well in identifying relevant reports with high precision and high recall.