I\'d like to write a \"smart monitor\" in Java that sends out an alert any time it detects oncoming performance issues. My Java app is writing data in a structured form
If you are interested in using support vector machines, there's a guide that is very oriented for beginners and you might find useful (http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/papers/guide/guide.pdf)
That guide is from the same guys of libsvm which is a very mature library for support vector machines (http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm/) and they do have binding for Java (http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm/#java)