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Downstream Suppression is Not Root Cause Analysis

• Tags:
• mission,
• technique,
• mission critical,
• managers

Overview This paper analyzes downstream suppression (DS), a popular technique for suppressing network alarms, sometimes mistakenly referred to as root cause analysis (RCA). DS is used in many network managers, including Riversoft NMOS now marketed as Micromuse Precision 3.1. We describe DS and analyze several weaknesses including: Limited relevance to the real problems plaguing today’s networks and distributed systems; Reliance on simplifying technical assumptions that rarely hold in mission-critical or business-critical networked systems; Inability to produce correct results in many real-world scenarios; Poor scalability and performance.

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