How IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps delivers unified operations management to the connected enterprise

Unified Operations Management is the latest development around the use of AI to support IT operations, an evolution that started with AIOps. Over time it's become clear that the application of AI is occurring inside existing market and tools segments, and this has been reflected in nomenclature by Gartner®. First AIOps split into AIOps Products that embed AI (like Observability) and AIOps Platforms, and now AIOps Platforms has been refined to Event Intelligence Solutions (EIS) to “direct focus to the intended domain and set of use cases,” with the release of a new Market Guide.

Companies have historically run on-premises IT deployments, managing the machines and, in some cases, the data center itself, along with the services and applications that run on them and the network that connects them. They have adopted hybrid multicloud, with most adding two or more cloud providers in addition to existing on-premises infrastructure. Plans to then simplify environments by adopting cloud-only strategies are now being paused and reconsidered as a trend toward cloud repatriation and a return to the data center emerges.

The connected enterprise also extends beyond hybrid multicloud. Almost every industry has physical assets that are connected to digital systems to create value for both customers and businesses. Banks have ATMs and in-branch terminals, retail has point of sales devices and in-store infrastructure, telecom companies have fixed line and mobile delivery networks, manufacturers have smart manufacturing infrastructure and connected manufacturing plants. All of these are connected to backend systems through private networks.

Each of these components of the connected enterprise typically has its own set of technology or subject matter expert-specific monitoring, observability and operations tools. These each provide a window into only one part of the connected enterprise. This introduces challenges in building shared and current understanding of the dependency chains across the connected enterprise, and effectively carrying out fault finding, troubleshooting and resolution when incidents that cascade across those chains inevitably cross tool and team boundaries.

These challenges are solved with Unified Operations Management, providing unified visibility, unified fault and incident management and unifying teams across the connected enterprise.

The Gartner Market Guide for Event Intelligence Solutions describes the mandatory features that come together to enable Unified Operations Management: “topology ingestion and assembly, cross-domain event ingestion, Event correlation and enrichment, Pattern recognition and clustering, Remediation and automation.”

We believe the IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps offers comprehensive features that align with the capabilities described in the Gartner Market Guide for Event Intelligence Solutions:

The ability to ingest and assemble a combined topology across the connected enterprise, we believe, provides a fundamental differentiator from previous generations of technology. That topology provides unified visibility across the expert-specific monitoring and observability tools, which leads to unified understanding, and unified context.

The value of the topology extends beyond visualization. We also believe it provides a step-change improvement in the ability to accurately identify the constituent parts of a cascade failure through more powerful forms of event correlation, enrichment and clustering. It also provides the necessary dependency and relationship information to automatically carry out fault localization, determining the origin of the cascade failure and vastly improving mean time to resolution as well as the blast radius or impacted services.

The Cloud Pak for AIOps can connect to and collect existing topology relationship information from the deployment monitoring and observability tools, merging and combining those to build the single unified topology based on the true state of what is deployed and running in the enterprise. This includes information about all of the components as well as the dependency relationships between them, which can also be augmented or enriched with other sources of data, such as a Configuration Management Database (CMDB). This provides a logical model and view of the connected enterprise.

Where location data is available, it becomes also possible to build a geographic model. This makes it possible to both show where problems are occurring but also identify where problems are driven by colocated problems such are power cuts. 

The core use case of unified operations management is the ability to provide unified incident and fault management, receiving events and alerts from the connected monitoring and observability tools to identify cascade failures that span across the individual windowed views those tools provide. In extreme cases this can consist of millions of events a day, coming from hundreds of connected tools, or tens of thousands of directly connected devices.

The Cloud Pak for AIOps provides 90+ out of the box event integrations, as well as multiple interfaces to ingest custom events. It also does this at scale, supporting some of the world’s largest banks and financial services companies, telcos and service providers, government institutions and manufacturing and transportation enterprises.

It is not possible to individually process millions, of even thousands of events per day. A large number of those might be noise, including repeated or duplicated events or known issues that do not result in a problem. They might also be constituent parts of a single incident that need to be brought together so that a single problem is being analyzed and resolved.

The Cloud Pak for AIOps provides multiple capabilities to merge repeated events, identify events that occur in a periodic, seasonal pattern and suppress noise. It also groups related events into incidents using scope and temporal based approaches, proximity-based approaches, as well as the most powerful topological based grouping that correlates through the relationships in the unified topology model.

This makes it possible to go from millions of events per day to a manageable number of real cascade failures and incidents.

The Gartner Market Guide for Event Intelligence Solutions describes that the final step is for EISs to “further expedite remediation by offering operators suggested next steps” with the aim to accelerate the time to resolution for the identified incident.

We feel, the Cloud Pak for AIOps then takes grouped failures and analyses them to provide prioritization, automatically carries our fault isolation to identify the probable cause or origin of the cascade failure and recommends relevant actions and automations to take.

Probable cause leverages the unified topology and the relationships that it models to understand how faults cascade through the system and uses that to immediately identify and highlight the most likely points of origin for the incident. These are then paired with similar incidents that are discovered from past closed tickets with information extracted and presented about how those incidents were resolved. Additionally, relevant runbooks and automations are recommended and presented, making it possible to take diagnostic, triage or resolution actions automatically or through one-click accelerating time to resolve.

We believe the Cloud Pak for AIOps aligns with the mandatory capabilities and common feature areas as described in the Gartner Market Guide for Event Intelligence Solutions.

We further feel the Cloud Pak for AIOps brings them together and uses them cohesively to deliver Unified Operations Management, providing unified visibility, unified fault and incident management and enabling unified teams across the connected enterprise.

To learn more, download the full report here: Gartner Market Guide for Event Intelligence Solutions

Gartner, Market Guide for Event Intelligence Solutions, 10 March 2025, Matt Crossley, Gregg Siegfried.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.