Architecture
Built on Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform, IBM Cloud Pak® for Watson AIOps combines a set of capabilities to provide a single solution that facilitates predicting, communicating, and resolving events before they become serious problems.
IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps integrates infrastructure and operations management into a single coherent structure across business applications, virtualized servers, network devices and protocols, and security and storage devices. IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps enables CIOs, site reliability engineers (SREs) and IT Operators by uncovering hidden insights from multiple sources of data (like logs, metrics, and events). It delivers those insights directly in to the tools that teams work with (like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and ServiceNow) in near real-time, and also presents them in a web-based user interface.
The core functions of IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps can be categorized into five capabilities: event management, incident detection and resolution, entity extraction, and insight delivery. These capabilities are supported by a network of connections that gather data. It also offers all facets of the AIOps lifecycle from model training to execution. These capabilities are bolstered by IBM Cloud Pak foundational services.
For information about the possible deployment configurations, see Installing.
Architectural diagrams
The following diagrams illustrate how these capabilities come together in IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps:
IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps
IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps is installed on Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform. For more information about the supported versions of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, see Supported Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform versions.
When installed, IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps includes access to the IBM Cloud Pak Automation console. This UI is a web-based application for accessing features and capabilities for IBM Cloud Paks, such as IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps. If you have multiple IBM Cloud Paks installed in the same environment, you can switch between working with each IBM Cloud Pak from this single UI.
Installing IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps gives you access to the following features and capabilities:
- AI modeling
- Applications
- Change risk
- Data ingestion
- Event grouping
- Log anomaly detection
- Metric anomaly detection
- Resolution automation (Runbooks, Policies, Actions)
- Similar incident comparison
- Incident management
- Topology
For more information about these features and capabilities, see features and capabilities.
Infrastructure Automation
Infrastructure automation is a standalone module within IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps. When you have a license for IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, you are entitled to install and use Infrastructure Automation. Infrastructure Automation consists of these components (formerly part of IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management):
- Managed services and service catalog, previously called Terraform & Service Automation or IBM Cloud Automation Manager
- Infrastructure management, previously called IBM Red Hat CloudForms.
Managed services provide the capability to automate provisioning of infrastructure and virtual machine applications using Terraform and Ansible. It includes supported versions of Terraform that works across multiple cloud environments with comprehensive IT workflow orchestration. Using out-of-box integration with Ansible, workflows can interconnect Terraform provisioning templates with Ansible playbooks for configuration management, fully supporting infrastructure-as-code (IaC) and GitOps best practices.The service catalog allows authors administrators to publish services and end users to self-service provision infrastructure and applications.
Infrastructure management delivers the insight, control, compliance and automation enterprises need to address the challenges of managing hybrid cloud environments, which are far more complex than physical ones. This technology enables enterprises with existing virtual, baremetal and cloud infrastructures to improve visibility, control and compliance, and those just starting hybrid cloud deployments to build and operate a well-managed hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Infrastructure Automation enables IT Operations and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) teams to use infrastructure as code practices to drive IT velocity and shift to the left of operations. With modernize infrastructure management, you can perform the following tasks:
- Shorten the time to provision infrastructure (VMs, Cloud Services, Kubernetes) across on-premises, private, and public clouds
- Create repeatable templates for common infrastructure requests
- Enable self-service catalogs to avoid manual responses to tickets
- Scale infrastructure automatically based on demand
- Support day-2 operations including automated compliance
- You can provision, run, and manage workloads on the infrastructure of your choice.
IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps Infrastructure Automation is installed on Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform. For more information about the supported versions of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, see Supported Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform versions.
IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps with Infrastructure Automation
Infrastructure automation can be used together with IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps to support use cases which require Terraform automation and service orchestration as part of the incident resolution process. Day 2 operations like changing the size of VMs, power management,or applying a patch are supported by Infrastructure Automation and can easily be accessed through a common console. They can also be automated through runbook actions by invoking Infrastructure Automation APIs. Both Infrastructure Automation and IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps integrate with ServiceNow and can be used together to calculate the risk score of infrastructure change requests.