Event Correlation

What is event correlation?

Event correlation is a process of analyzing relationships between two events. Correlating events helps IT organizations make sense out of copious events and pinpoints the few that are important. Event correlation uses software and automation tools called event correlators. These tools received monitoring and event management data from IT environments. Event correlators analyze the data and group the different events to identify a cause and solution to a problem. Using event correlation tools, IT teams can:

• Interpret various events and produce associated responses;
• Include anomaly detection and identification features to find patterns; and
• Increase efficiency.

What does it mean when events are correlated?

One of the biggest challenges in dynamic environments is managing large number of events. One solution to event correlation is event correlation suppression, which removes duplicates of the same event and reports them as a single entity. Correlated events help provide businesses with a unified view of their IT environments.

Which are steps in the event correlation process? 

There are many different steps involved in the event correlation process to analyze the relationship between events:

• Aggregation: gathering monitoring data from the different tools into a single area for easy access.
• Filtering: filtering the monitoring data before processing.
• Deduplication: identifying duplicates of an event for the same occurrence to make alerts clearer.
• Normalization: ensures monitoring data that is gathered from different sources are consistent for AI to correlate the data.
• Root Cause Analysis: analyses the data to determine underlying causes by looking at patterns between events.
• Action Triggering: instigates a follow-up action.

What are the event types for event correlation?

Different types of events are analyzed and correlated depending on an organization’s IT environment. The common types of events are:

• System Events: changes in computing system such as a full disk
• Operating System Events: are generated by operating systems that are interfaces between hardware and software
• Application Events: are generated by software applications and includes transactions like e-commerce purchases
• Database Events: occurs in the reading, updating, and storing of data in the databases
• Web Server Events: delivers content to the web pages
• Network Events: involves devices such as routers or switches

Event Correlation Approaches

Event correlation focuses on analyzing relationships and patterns between event data. There are different approaches and techniques that are used to look at event characteristics:

• Time-Based Event Correlation: analyses the timing and sequence of events
• Rule-Based Event Correlation: compares events with specific values for variables
• Pattern-Based Event Correlation: analyzes events with a defined pattern without specifying values
• Topology-Based Event Correlation: maps to the topology of a network devices or applications that are affected
• Domain-Based Event Correlation: correlates event data from monitoring systems that focus on an aspect of IT operations
• History-Based Correlation: compares new events to past events to learn from historical events

Benefits of Event Correlation

IT Event correlation gathers infrastructure data and recognizes meaningful patterns between events. Event correlation techniques enables teams to be more efficient and effective in identifying and resolving problems, making it a crucial process that has many use cases and benefit such as:

• Reduced IT operational costs;
• Greater efficiency;
• Real-Time malware detection;
• Faster response times; and
• Enhanced customer satisfaction.