Modern IT Operations need modern IT approaches.

It has never been clearer that a new approach for managing IT operations (ITOps) is necessary. Over the course of the last year alone, 70% of technology executives reported an increase in IT ticket and call volume. As the world moves toward digital at lightning pace, the strain it has put on ITOps teams has been tremendous, accelerating IT complexity that limits the ability to respond quickly across an IT environment. 

And if the digital acceleration was not enough, a global pandemic has increased the pressure on IT and the complexity of services and tools that IT utilizes. Who else felt completely frozen when our favorite collaboration tool crashed at the first of the year? Using existing IT tools and processes is simply insufficient. That’s why Gartner said that the number of business leaders relying on AIOps platforms for automated insights will increase by 10x by the year 2024.

Business leaders are turning to AIOps for help

The sheer explosion in the amount of IT data combined with the increased expectations on IT leaders to align with and measure success on business objectives means that IT teams need to find new ways to manage all of this complexity. They need to apply consistent, scalable AI-powered automation in order to manage and automate modern hybrid cloud environments.

Resolve and prevent incidents with AIOps

That is the exact problem that the new IBM Cloud Pak® for Watson AIOps solves for the modern enterprise. IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps is an AIOps platform that deploys advanced, explainable artificial intelligence (AI) across the entire ITOps toolchain, giving you the ability to quickly and confidently assess, diagnose, resolve and prevent incidents across mission-critical workloads. Our unique application-centric approach helps you automate labor-intensive IT processes and proactively mitigate high impact events. IBM helps you improve responsiveness and reduce risk with AI at the core of your IT operations — true, patented AI. 

IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps is powered by the strongest IBM Watson AI capabilities, like natural language understanding (NLU), machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). In addition to world-leading AI capabilities, it also contains powerful event management, anomaly detection and event group capabilities, making it the ideal platform for accurately detecting and diagnosing both application-related and IT infrastructure-related issues to reduce downtime and bring intelligent IT operations to your organization:

Gain visibility with enterprise observability

In order to apply AI and automation, we must first obtain visibility into what is going on in an IT environment. That is why observability is so important, and that is why IBM acquired Instana. Observability provides deep visibility into modern distributed applications for faster, automated problem identification and resolution. 

Instana is the preferred observability feed for IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps. This powerful combination offers AI-powered automation that enables DevSecOps to optimize people, processes and tools across environments with trusted and explainable AI. Instana adds leading observability capabilities for automated remediation, powered by a continuous stream of contextualized telemetry data.

Observability for cloud native (and other complex) applications is difficult in its own right, but gaining the necessary visibility and delivering the resulting data streams to an AIOps system requires specific capabilities. First, the observability platform must detect and understand all dependencies between application entities (from infrastructure to application code) and deliver that understanding to any analytics engine. Second, the data delivered must always be accurate and up to date, requiring automatic real-time detection and monitoring configuration. Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform is leading the way in combining automatic monitoring with programmatic understanding of the full application stack:

The vision for AIOps and enterprise observability

Where can we go with this powerful combination of enterprise observability and world-leading AI capability? 

1. We will see the impact of this up-to-date and deep-visibility data with better recommendations coming from AI. This is what is called AI-enhanced ITOps and will have an impact of increased ITOps efficiency. As more trust is gained, this will lead us from AI-enhanced to fully automated ITOps for modern workloads, which will improve our quality of service while reducing our labor spend in IT.
2. We envision being able to simulate change management scenarios before they are implemented, such as reducing the instances of your services to save costs or even wholesale moving workloads to different clusters. With the deep AI-driven understanding of dependencies and relationships, simulations can be performed that highlight fragile components or areas where a single failure could have ripple effects across your business.
3. We envision faster development cycles, resulting in improved business outcomes. With the labor savings from ITOps and the ability to simulate change, businesses can now focus on enhancing their core value. Managing services levels is easier with automated observability, and it drives higher confidence levels with increased change cycles. As continuous innovation delivery becomes mainstream, feedback is quickly fed back to product development teams enabling rapid iterations towards their goals of complete client satisfaction.

This powerful combination of AIOps and enterprise observability is providing value today for organizations around the world, and IBM is leading the way with IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps and IBM observability powered by Instana.  

Get started with IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps and Instana

• To learn more about Instana, check out this “Play with” Demo.
• Learn more about IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps.