Data Analytics for IT Networks: Developing Innovative Use Cases, First Edition

Chapter 2

Approaches for Analytics and Data Science

This chapter examines a simple methodology and approach for developing analytics solutions. When I first started analyzing networking data, I used many spreadsheets, and I had a lot of data access, but I did not have a good methodology to approach the problems. You can only sort, filter, pivot, and script so much when working with a single data set in a spreadsheet. You can spend hours, days, or weeks diving into the data, slicing and dicing, pivoting this way and that…only to find that the best you can do is show the biggest and the smallest data points. You end up with no real insights. When you share your findings to glassy-eyed managers, the rows and columns of data are a lot more interesting ...