How Watson AIOPs AI provides a competitive advantage for customers.

IBM Cloud Pak® for Watson AIOps v3.1 was recently released to acclaim, and it builds upon earlier success with a modern UX, proactively avoiding incidents by providing insight across multiple data sets and a preview of the change risk advisor. What does it mean to be competitive? It means bringing resources to bear that level up your IT Operations team by leveling down the toil and getting ahead of problems before they even start.

Let’s talk about artificial intelligence (AI). There’s a lot of confusion about what “AI” actually means. In this case, I’ll be using the word AI to discuss some machine learning features and capabilities that are unique to IBM.

Market results demonstrate that with better AI, comes better outcomes. But how do you define “better”? In our case, better is defined as ease of use and the patented technology behind the AI. Let’s explore:

No-code AI – putting humans to work

A great competitive advantage for IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps is the low-code engagement. Other AIOps companies require deep data science resources to identify and select the right algorithms to use, which costs extensive time and money. IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps has pre-trained models available out of the box, offering easily identified outcomes in simple language, accelerating your time to value as you move to using more AI in your IT Operations:

Furthering that, we have advanced our AI Hub and Model management features. Instead of being a separate machine learning toolkit, our AI model management is embedded right in the solution, allowing a user to easily walk-through what models are active and how they are running.

Something that differentiates us is that we use patented AI — this is where we see a great deal of improvement in . . . sleep. What do we mean by that? Well, really, IBM’s patented AI results in less false positives. What does false positive mean? It’s like your fire alarm going off at 1:30 am because the battery is starting to fail without any warning. That erroneous fire alarm is a false positive – saying that there was a problem when there really wasn’t. 

False positives happen hundreds of times in IT Operations environments where teams must sift out emergencies from the false positives, sometimes at 3:00 am. Imagine if you were only awakened because of a true issue and no more false positives at 3:00 am; that’s how we in IT Operations get more sleep. This is possible because of IBM’s deep investment and leadership in AI research, blending tried and true algorithms with cutting-edge research technology.

AIOps without real-time communication fails to bring value

AIOps helps teams reduce complexity and strives to provide quick root-cause analysis and a helping hand during an incident or outage. Pre-COVID, many times teams would have come together in person to resolve critical outages or incidents, reviewing dashboards and screens to troubleshoot the cause of a problem, building a story and taking action to resolve it. Forrester notes in the December 2020 report “Harness ChatOps to Empower Remote Collaboration” that ChatOps helps facilitate automation and communication by reducing context-switching, providing a central hub for all the work and helping to maintain continuity through knowledge preservation. Some AIOps companies still work on this reactive, dashboard monitoring view of the incident management, with a proprietary incident management interface based on dashboards. IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, on the other hand, realizes that incidents need to be resolved where teams already work, in real-time communication solutions like Slack or MS Teams. 

The best AIOps platforms are domain-agnostic

Gartner’s recent AIOps Market Research report explores the benefit of domain-agnostic AIOps solutions. A “domain” is a type or category of data. For example, logs would be a domain of data, as are observable metrics from server components. There are many vendors on the market who bring a depth of legacy experience with specific domains and can provide AIOps features on that specific IT Operations domain, but that single, specialized view misses the big picture because application health is understood from many different types of data. If you only look at one domain to understand the health of your application, how can you be certain you are not missing a key symptom of health or illness?

Customers who build AIOps for the future anticipate better returns

IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps is built future proof. AIOps is a journey that touches all areas of IT Operations: people, processes, culture and tools.

We believe all customers need to move through the AIOps journey at their own pace. IBM supports you where you are:

• Data-domain agnostic: As discussed earlier in this article, unlocking the power of data across domains is what will prepare companies for success. No company is making less data today; they are only making more.
• Consistent platform for long-term ease of use: An investment into one Cloud Pak unlocks the power of all. The consistent look and feel with other IBM Cloud Paks enables teams to quickly adopt new use cases without having to learn another system.
• Surround the existing toolchain investment: Don’t get locked into a system. IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps surrounds your existing tooling or direct connects to data sources, putting the power of building the future the way that’s right for your business.
• Continued investment in solving IT Operations with new AI- and Automation-powered use cases: IBM Change Risk Advisor is unlike any other solution in the market today. IBM’s pre-trained change risk advisor model checks your code for challenges and gives you an assessment of the risk of implementing that code before it reaches production. 

Visit the AIOps field guide for more details.

Additional information

IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps looks to help you gain the competitive edge by reducing the time it takes to resolve problems with a powerful combination of the following:

• The easy-to-use user interface on simple, consistent platform
• Patented AI combined with proven algorithms developed by the world-class researchers at IBM
• Data-domain agnostic stance; insight from multiple types of data
• Future proof by collaborating where people work and will continue to work with ChatOps, solving new and tough problems with Change Risk Advisor and building solutions that allow you to leverage your existing investment

For more information about how IBM and the IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps can help you and your organization with AI, Automation, and IT Operations, visit our THINK sessions:

• Creating an automation-first culture across IT and business
• Automating and optimizing IT operations management with AI
• Automate IT operations at scale across Hybrid Cloud environments
• Empowering IT operations and development teams with Enterprise Observability

Visit our IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps page to learn more.