Described herein are techniques for better understanding problems arising in an illustrative information management system, such as a data storage management system, and for issuing appropriate alerts and reporting to data management professionals. The illustrative embodiments include a number of features that detect and raise awareness of anomalies in system operations. Categories of interest include events and job anomalies, such as long-running jobs and job success/failure rates. Anomalies are characterized by frequency anomalies and/or by occurrence counts. Utilization is also of interest for certain key system resources, such as deduplication databases, CPU and memory at the storage manager, etc., without limitation. Predicting low utilization periods for these and other key resources is useful for scheduling maintenance activities without interfering with ordinary data protection jobs.