SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR ANALYZING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SYSTEMS USING COLLABORATIVE INTELLIGENCE

An information technology (IT) system of interest is analyzed using colla borative, community-based sharing of expert knowledge, analysis and advice t hrough user-submitted analysis rules and/or user-submitted report templates. Users may submit rules that have been found to be useful in analyzing or ma naging IT systems. A rule may analyze a particular item of configuration dat a or performance data according to a predetermined criterion. Other users ma y apply these rules to their own systems' data and, thereby, utilize the col lective expertise of the people who submitted the rules. Performance and con figuration data from IT systems or components of the systems in various ente rprises is collected and then sanitized by removing or masking identifying i nformation before storing the sanitized data in a data warehouse. An IT mana ger may compare data from his/her IT system to historical data from the syst em or to data from IT systems having similar workloads, configurations, prob lems or according to other matching criteria, without obtaining confidential information about the comparison systems. Such comparisons may use the user - submitted rules. Reports are generated from these analyses and comparisons according to predefined and/or user-submitted report templates and report c omponent templates for items such as text blocks, tables, graphs, charts and block diagrams.