1. A method of identifying at least one exceptional managed system amongst a set of comparable managed systems, each managed system having a number of system configuration attributes, the method comprising: selecting a set of managed systems; selecting a set of parameterizations relating to the managed systems; determining a pattern for each of the parameterizations based on the system configuration attributes; comparing substantially each of the managed systems to substantially each of the patterns; and isolating a managed system based on the comparing; wherein the patterns are determined by a supervised machine learning algorithm.