Juggling the Jigsaw: towards automated problem inference from network trouble tickets

This paper presents NetSieve, a system that aims to do automated problem inference from network trouble tickets. Network trouble tickets are diaries comprising fixed fields and free-form text written by operators to document the steps while troubleshooting a problem. Unfortunately, while tickets carry valuable information for network management, analyzing them to do problem inference is extremely difficult—fixed fields are often inaccurate or incomplete, and the free-form text is mostly written in natural language.