Accelerating digital transformation and reducing environmental impact

Sartini and his team provide services that fall under three main areas of focus: ITIL Services, Cognitive Services and Business Services. Their services include but are not limited to multicloud management, application performance management, continuous vulnerability and compliance monitoring as well as hybrid cloud cost optimization. Their typical clients have between 100 and 500 servers, and they maintain environments that are on-premises, in Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), and on hybrid cloud. BlueIT’s team also manages 50 SAP landscapes. “Today, when onboarding a new client, we start by deploying Turbonomic and we turn to Instana to assure application performance during clients’ critical releases,” explains Sartini.

Given the heterogeneity of their clients’ environments, it is critical that Sartini and his team have the tools they need to onboard each new client efficiently and continuously optimize application performance moving forward. Ease of deployment and time to value are key. “We have found that the initial setup of Turbonomic and Instana is simple and immediate,” notes Sartini. In the course of a single day, both tools can be deployed and start proactively identifying resizing opportunities. Instana has a single agent that can be installed in a matter of minutes, while Turbonomic can be installed in a matter of hours. “When onboarding a new customer, we can now show them in just a few clicks how Turbonomic and Instana can work in their own environment,” explains Sartini. Turbonomic provides AI-powered hybrid cloud cost optimization, while Instana provides infrastructure monitoring and observability. “Each tool has an exhaustive dashboard that is easy to navigate and provides actionable insight right away,” notes Sartini.

Before they began adopting AIOps, the BlueIT team relied on disparate monitoring tools and manual intervention to optimize their clients’ environments. Now, they have a full-stack view and AI-powered automation helping them identify resource congestion before the end-user experience is impacted. “The place I see all the power of the AI approach is in the fact that these tools [Turbonomic and Instana] proactively show us where potential problems are and they recommend resourcing actions to improve the sizing of the resources and assure performance,” notes Sartini.

By adopting this new approach and reducing their reliance on manual intervention, the team has freed up time for helping each client accelerate digital transformation and meet sustainability goals. “The sustainability paradigm in IT rests on an organization’s ability to achieve the right balance between resource allocation and end-user experience. In my opinion, implementing Turbonomic and Instana is without a doubt the best way to right-size your infrastructure and reduce your carbon footprint without sacrificing performance,” argues Sartini.

Since shifting to AIOps, BlueIT has seen strong improvements in performance and resource allocation. For example, with the help of Turbonomic and Instana, the BlueIT team has achieved a 50% reduction in mean time to recovery (MTTR) and a 60% reduction in the time required to implement a resourcing action. Furthermore, they have reduced waste across their clients’ environments. For one client, BlueIT achieved a 10% reduction in memory and CPU over-allocation after executing Turbonomic’s AI-powered resourcing recommendations. Increasing the utilization of their clients’ existing infrastructure, and eliminating any unutilized resources, is an important step in their journey to help clients reduce carbon emissions.

As they move forward, the BlueIT team is aiming to shift from Turbonomic’s resourcing recommendations to its automated resourcing actions, and they are looking to increase their clients’ adoption of Instana. Finally, they are planning to implement IBM Cloud Pak® for Watson AIOps. “We are excited to explore how IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps can support us in Event Correlation. We want everyone across the organization to have the same level of information and use the same collaboration tool whenever there is a critical situation. ChatOps will be very instrumental in helping us adopt an AI-based Root Cause approach,” explains Sartini.

BlueIT (link resides outside of ibm.com) is an IT services provider and benefit company headquartered in Italy that is on a mission is to safely accelerate its clients’ digital transformation journeys through its digital solutions, cybersecurity services and cognitive managed services.