Apparata, articles and methods for discovering partially periodic temporal associations, referred to herein as p-patterns, are provided. For example, a p-pattern in computer networks might comprise five repetitions every 30 seconds of a port-down event followed by a port-up event, which in turn is followed by a random gap until the next five repetitions of these events. In one embodiment, the present invention comprises: (i) a normalization step to convert application-oriented event data into an application-independent normalized table; (ii) an algorithm for finding significant period lengths from normalized events (e.g., 30 seconds) using a Chi-squared test; and (iii) an algorithm for finding a partially periodic temporal association (e.g., port-down followed by port-up) given a known period.