Detecting device utilization imbalances

Embodiments monitor statistics from groups of devices and generate an alarm upon detecting a utilization imbalance that is beyond a threshold. Particular balance statistics are periodically sampled, over a timeframe, for a group of devices configured to have balanced utilization. The devices are ranked at every data collection timestamp based on the gathered device statistics. The numbers of times each device appears within each rank over the timeframe are tallied. The device/rank summations are collectively used as a probability distribution representing the probability of each device being ranked at each of the rankings in the future. Based on this probability distribution, an entropy value that represents a summary of the imbalance of the group of devices over the timeframe is derived. An imbalance alert is generated when one or more entropy values for a group of devices shows an imbalanced utilization of the devices going beyond an identified imbalance threshold.