Why Will IT Operations Be Irrelevant If They Do Not Adopt AIOps?
As a customer-centric IT solutions provider, we utilize AIOps to help enterprises reach their goals. That’s because we’re aware of the challenges and issues that our enterprise customers often experience. And while they may know what these are, they can’t always pinpoint the direct causes. But we can, by implementing a full-stack observability strategy that unveils all factors that negatively impact their businesses.
Now, think of your business and how its day-to-day functions could potentially suffer or have suffered due to IT issues. Service outages cause severe slowdowns, leading to many unhappy customers and demoralized staff members. Or high case volumes inundate your call center, which frustrates both customers and staff. And quite possibly, redundant tools are holding back many vital business operations.
Have you experienced any of these issues, or is your current enterprise IT environment a cause for concern? Read on to learn how AIOps not only helps your business but is crucial for its future prospects.
A Brief Summary Of Pain Points And Positive Outcomes
Below are several challenges enterprise customers often run into with the current observability strategy:
- Longer services outages
- Too many redundant tools
- Too many calls
- No single pane of glass management
- No Key Performance Indicator (KPI) reporting
- No Proactive or Predictive analysis
To circumvent these challenges and bring about positive change, we prioritize the following business outcomes:
- Reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR)
- Decrease the call center case volume
- Proactive Monitoring
- Single point of management for visibility
- Service Level Agreement (SLA) tracking and management
- Reduce tool and infrastructure cost
- KPI reporting
- Increase developer and end-user productivity
- Apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) to enhance data and build intelligent use cases for proactive monitoring
How To Achieve These Goals?
Ensure that you have implemented the correct monitoring strategy for your enterprise IT environment. At the very least, have the most essential domain-centric IT infrastructure in place. These include your app, cloud, data center, logging, and end-user monitoring tools.
Then, begin with an Observability Maturity Assessment, which identifies current gaps and limitations of your current toolset. Now you’re ready to plan and build the right monitoring strategy that fits your business goals and objectives.
Understanding Full-Stack Observability And Its Benefits
Modern technology stacks are incredibly complex, making them difficult to evaluate without the right tools and methodologies. Furthermore, enterprises that rely on legacy components and attempt to leverage these with modern technologies face many challenges. These companies could be dealing with a range of older and newer application programming interfaces (APIs), cloud services, and microservices.
Attempting to monitor all these with traditional tooling will unlikely bring about the desired results. However, with full-stack observability, it’s possible to gain a detailed view of the entire technology stack in real-time. Having access to analytical data revealing application performance, end-user behavior, and infrastructure health helps reduce troubleshooting time considerably.
AIOps In A Nutshell
Beyond full-stack observability, we need to look at Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps). These consist of various multi-layered platforms that utilize analytics and ML to enhance enterprise IT processes. Unlike traditional monitoring tools,Domain agnostic AIOps can collect and accurately analyze Big Data, perform detailed analytics, and react to any issues in real-time. Enterprises that implement AIOps can expect automated insights, leading to continuous improvement of business processes.
” There is no future of IT operations that does not include AIOps. This is due to the rapid growth in data volumes and pace of change (exemplified by the rate of application delivery and event-driven business models) that cannot wait on humans to derive insights.”
~ Source Gartner
Why Do We Need AIOps?
AIOps platforms help enhance a broad range of IT practices including, Application Operations, DevOps, DevSecOps, infrastructure operations, and service management. They also ingest data from various sources such as application logs, events, IT service management (ITSM), metadata, metrics, network data, and traces, to name a few.
And when utilizing domain-centric IT monitoring tools consisting of infrastructure and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Networking Performance Monitoring (NPM) — we can apply AI/ML algorithms. These algorithms will use real-time and historical data for event correlation, proactive remediation, predictive issue management, faster root cause analysis (RCA), and many more.
Ultimately, the goal of AIOps is to continuously enhance the quality of data so IT operations teams can implement multiple use cases relevant to their practices. It detects anomalies and then provides contextual insights to business owners. Thus, allowing them to create new products and features based on data and faster RCA.
Today’s highly competitive business environment means that IT organizations no longer have the luxury to react to issues after they occur. Therefore, they need to become proactive and circumvent issues before end-users experience them.
But it’s unwise to rely exclusively on domain-centric tools, as these have several visibility gaps. For example, it’s not uncommon to run into web app performance issues with APM and NPM tools. And each domain-centric tool gives its own view, making it harder to isolate the problem while causing longer troubleshooting times.
Enter AIOps-driven event correlation, which ingests data from monitoring and ITSM tools, solving the problem far more efficiently. It does this by eliminating noise found in observability data. And apart from detecting anomalies, it creates actionable incidents while dramatically reducing case volumes and improving IT Operations (ITOps) team bandwidth.
What Is The Current State Of AIOps Adoption?
Most enterprise IT monitoring strategies follow the reactive/responsive model. They’re attempting to modernize the current monitoring stack; however, whether or not they make much progress depends on other priorities. Also, when they try to change their tools, they run into several issues related to data fed to the response team. And this results in integration challenges and alerts that cause various setbacks.
But AIOps is an emerging technology, so adoption has been minimal due to a clear strategy on moving from a reactive to an autonomous observability posture.
Implementing Managed AIOps
Since we can now weigh up the benefits of AIOps — consider what this means for your business? More importantly, examine what steps to take for a successful outcome.
When implementing managed AIOps, we need to plan, ingest data, and transform your IT operations towards autonomous observability. In turn, you’ll reap the benefits of anomaly detection and receive invaluable insights about your business. These insights may reveal areas that need your attention, such as creating additional products or releasing new features and updates. And several of these insights will come from collected data, faster RCA, and tickets.
Then, we can utilize domain agnostic AIOps tools such as BigPanda, which will integrate and connect with your existing tools. We’ll now have access to advanced reporting capabilities, data preparation and presentation features, and transparent ML. Furthermore, there’s no need to make configuration changes in your current environment or learn new tools. And based on your requirements, a managed service provider (MSP) can help you achieve the desired outcome.
The Bottom Line
Business leaders should consider how they gather and analyze their data. Unfortunately, traditional monitoring tools and methodologies can’t effectively meet the Big Data demands of modern enterprises. But if they implement full-stack observability, they can gain a detailed view of their entire technology stack. And with AIOps, they can efficiently gather all data points that impact business via robust automation-driven platforms.
If you’re seeking ways to transform your existing IT operations to improve vital processes and future-proof your business, then you need to work with the right service provider. Contact us today to learn how NetServ can help enhance your IT infrastructure and achieve your goals.