As application and IT environment complexity continue to grow, AI can address the challenge of proactively managing incidents before they occur.

The need for the digitization of everyday processes — like shopping and banking — has changed from growing steadily to growing exponentially. According to McKinsey, the percentage of business channels replaced by digital rose from 16% to 34% between 2019 and 2020. To support this sudden influx in demand, teams everywhere are deploying new applications and infrastructure that introduce new complexity for IT organizations. In fact, 80% of organizations estimate that they have up to 1,000 applications in their portfolio today (IDC, Worldwide Application Services, April 2021). The workforce is also struggling to handle the complexity, and the Great Resignation has affected IT teams, with one in three workers now considering leaving their jobs (MagnifyMoney Report, 2021).

These three issues — digitization, growing IT complexity and the Great Resignation — are all tied together, and they are increasing the pressure on companies to optimize their app performance and deliver a best-of-breed customer experience.

The urgent need for help

What does all of this mean for your business and IT team? Employees with vital institutional knowledge are increasingly considering leaving for their next roles. Sudden departures can leave a knowledge gap, and with key expertise on application dependencies or resolution strategies gone, teams may struggle to resolve incidents at the same pace as user demands. 

Even where turnover is not an issue, all trends point to the continued expansion of current IT environments to match the growing demand in consumer expectations. The current workforce simply cannot handle the millions of events and alerts that come into an IT environment each day. The rates of change and expansion are difficult for any human to keep up with, yet teams must still meet SLOs and SLAs because applications are a critical part of the business, and less uptime means less revenue or lifetime value. 

AI joins the team

Though this growth in consumer demand is rapidly increasing, artificial intelligence (AI) has been evolving at an equally fast rate to take on the influx of data. AI is able to silence the noise around the growing number of alerts by 50%, which can help lessen the burden of IT team members who have to decipher them.

Furthermore, instead of requiring certain team members to maintain institutional and historical knowledge of IT environments and previous incidents — like having a subject matter expert keep track of which automation runbooks resolve certain issues — AI is able to step up to this role and eliminate the manual processes. It can correlate events, add context to outages, guide IT workers to automated repair strategies and predict and resolve incidents before they occur. It can even eliminate 80% of the time spent remediating false-positive incidents. This frees up more time for team members, decreases the crushing pressure of matching business needs and enables IT leaders to spend their time on innovation initiatives.

The way that AI tackles this rate of change in demand is by helping IT teams predict incidents before they even occur. In fact, proactive incident resolution is a key component of our IBM Watson AIOps platform today.

Proactive incident management with IBM Cloud Pak® for Watson AIOps

In IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps v3.3, our story viewer brings proactive incident resolution to the forefront of ITOps. In the alerts view, when a deviation from the metrics baseline occurs, the side panel shows metric anomaly details that highlight the trend over time. In this way, Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps helps IT teams see trends before an incident may occur:

If an incident does occur, the AIOps story view will show lots of context surrounding the incident. You no longer have to dig through event after event in an event viewer. Instead, you will see a holistic view of the probable root cause, the topology showing the probable cause and recommended automations (runbooks) that can help resolve the story:

IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps delivers real-time insights with business context, empowering your teams to make informed decisions faster. This enables your IT teams to deliver experiential excellence, bridge talent gaps and drive more business outcomes with reliability and efficiency through intelligent IT operations. 

Get started

• To learn more about IBM’s AIOps solution, check it out here.
• If you’re interested in learning more about IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, check out our product page here.
• Learn more about our latest Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps v3.3 release by exploring our product tour here.
• To dive deeper into the components of Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, register for TechCon 2022 and hear from our subject matter experts directly.