IT operations management (ITOM) is responsible for managing information technology requirements within an organization, overseeing the provisioning, capacity, performance, and availability of IT infrastructure and resources. This includes computing, networking and application resources, both on premises and in cloud.
ITOM facilitates the execution of routine tasks that promote quality, efficiency, and a positive end-user experience across IT resource delivery. It is a sub-discipline of IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on the operational aspects of the service lifecycle. Within the ITSM model, ITOM focuses on the behind-the-scenes service management that’s not typically visible to the end-user.
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Effective ITOM ensures that all business services, IT systems, and applications are available and operating properly, and ultimately keeps the business running. To achieve this, ITOM teams oversee three main tasks:
ITOM teams are responsible for managing the hardware and software infrastructure, as well as the network services, needed to provide internal and external business communications. This includes routers, switches, hubs, monitoring tools, software applications, operating systems, and network services such as VPN administration and TCP/IP addressing.
Many tasks can fall under the help desk umbrella, including incident response, event response and request fulfillment, as well as IT infrastructure operations like scheduling and managing data backups, user account management, system access and disaster recovery.
This includes managing endpoints (installing upgrades or patching vulnerabilities, for example), such as servers, desktops, laptops, mobile and IoT devices, and ensuring user access to storage.
In each of these three areas, ITOM establishes the processes that IT teams use to deploy, implement, and support services throughout their lifecycles. This includes outlining standard remediation practices, which helps to reduce outages and downtime and improve user experience. Successful ITOM programs help streamline workflows, increase application and network availability, and improve the performance of service operations.
Teams typically use a suite of ITOM tools and software. This software, as Gartner notes (link resides outside ibm.com), is designed to facilitate the management, performance and availability of IT resources, and ensure the optimization of their delivery.
ITOM solutions provide oversight and control via the following tools:
This repository helps teams manage the data associated with the IT environment and the components that are used to deliver IT services. It provides a centralized view of all IT assets and configurations, and the relationships between them, for better asset management and service mapping.
This software is used to automate the creation, deployment, and scaling of containers. It makes networking and container orchestration simpler and more efficient.
PaaS, or Platform-as-a-Service, providers offer cloud management of hardware, software, and infrastructure for developing, running, and managing applications. ITOM tools show teams what PaaS resources are being used and how they are performing.
These tools give IT teams deeper insight into events and system performance, providing context and enabling faster responses and more streamlined management.
Newer ITOM solutions incorporate artificial intelligence to improve monitoring and application performance. These tools combine advanced analytics and AI to proactively identify emerging problems, diagnose problems across diverse IT environments, assign incidents properly and more.
IT service management (ITSM) is the approach to managing and delivering IT services to both internal and external users. It creates a standardized system for IT services delivery, from design to support. An effective ITSM program involves collecting and analyzing IT insights to help inform business decisions.
Both ITOM and ITSM are defined in the ITIL framework, which outlines the role and activities of IT service management, and play a role in network management. The terms are often used interchangeably, but there are differences. ITSM takes a long view of the IT service lifecycle. It focuses on the strategic development of an organization’s network, infrastructure and computing resources, and associated IT management practices like change management and service desk operations. IT operations management focuses on the day-to-day activities of managing IT.
IT operations, or ITOps, and ITOM are frequently confused, and it is easy to see why. Both are closely involved in keeping IT services up and running, and IT operations is used in the acronym ITOM. While ITOPs refers to the roles and tasks related to IT service management, ITOM refers to the management processes and tools used to maintain a company’s technology components and computing requirements.
ITOM oversees a wide range of complex and dependent technologies that all need to work together seamlessly. Common challenges include:
- IT infrastructure sprawl: As companies advance their transition to the cloud, new technologies like virtualization, Internet of Things (IoT) and as-a-service offerings have made managing IT more complicated. For example, 80% of organizations estimate they have up to 1,000 applications in their portfolio today, according to the IDC Worldwide Application Services Survey 2021. ITOM teams often need broad expertise to manage these elaborate environments and the ability to adapt quickly to changing technology.
- Integration: The complexity of systems makes it difficult for applications and other IT components to communicate with each other. Businesses need data to move fluidly between applications and departments to gain better insights and work efficiently. The integration challenge complicates ITOM roles like application performance monitoring, cybersecurity operations and event management.
- Visibility: IT environments that include a mix of legacy infrastructure and systems spread across data centers and cloud services can create a visibility challenge when trying to view the big picture. This can make it hard to allocate resources appropriately and get the data needed to make strategic decisions.
- Scalability: Without visibility and a solution for integrating systems and applications on separate platforms, it can be difficult for IT operations to scale when new services must be introduced and maintained. This can lead to fractured and shadow IT and increased ITOM costs.
IT teams are looking to create richer, more robust experiences and applications. Doing so requires ITOM tools that integrate with existing tools to extract better insights from data. Organizations are turning to AI-powered automation to improve speed, visibility, utilization, and service delivery.
Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) allows companies to use AI capabilities to proactively interpret and leverage huge volumes of data, identify significant events and patterns related to application performance and availability and diagnose root causes. Through these actions, AIOps helps companies cut costs and improve IT department efficiency. According to the EMA report AI(Work)Ops 2021: The State of AIOps, AIOps has proven successful for companies that are early adopters, returning very high value relative to cost in 80% of the implementations and at least paying for itself in all cases.
In addition, ITOM software supports IT tasks with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). AI and ML help teams automate ITOM tasks, enable low-code/no-code IT service management, and offer proactive incident management to anticipate issues and resolve them faster. These advancements help to make ITOM programs more effective while also lightening the load of IT departments.
The advantages of AIOps help to solve ITOM challenges by providing:
AIOps helps teams make sense of chaotic IT environments, whether they operate on prem, on cloud, or on a hybrid cloud model. Available integrations within AIOps tools enable observability automation and the delivery of actionable insights, optimizing performance and enhancing the overall user experience.
Because AI offers greater visibility into application performance and functionality, DevOps can collect troubleshooting data from a production environment in near real-time. This allows for faster error resolution, even when services are widely distributed.
As companies continue their digital transformation, they need greater insight into resource allocation and cost optimization to ensure effective, efficient operations. Using AI insights helps ensure teams manage resources in the most advantageous way possible.
ITOM teams manage problems across the IT environment, often using disparate technologies. AIOps provides intelligent alerting to prioritize alerts and reduce false positives. Event correlation and predictive threat detection help reduce MTTD (mean time to detection) and MTTR (mean time to resolution) making teams more efficient and helping free up time for strategic tasks.
Innovate faster, reduce operational cost and transform IT operations (ITOps) across a changing landscape with an AIOps platform that delivers visibility into performance data and dependencies across environments.
IBM Instana democratizes observability by providing a solution that anyone and everyone can use to get the data they want with the context they need. Purpose-built for cloud native yet technology-agnostic, the platform automatically and continuously provides high fidelity data—1 second granularity and end-to-end traces—with the context of logical and physical dependencies across mobile, web, applications, and infrastructure.
The IBM Turbonomic® hybrid cloud cost optimization platform allows you to continuously automate critical actions in real time that proactively deliver the most efficient use of compute, storage and network resources to your apps at every layer of the stack.
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In this article, we define the terms that we use in Watson AIOps analytical pipelines, such as anomalies, alerts, incidents and more.
ITOps is the process of implementing, managing, delivering and supporting IT services to meet the business needs of internal and external users.
ITSM is the practice of planning, implementing, managing and optimizing IT services to meet the needs of users and help organizations achieve their business goals.
Network management is the practice of ensuring network resources are readily available to users and services as efficiently and securely as possible.
A help desk is a software tool or team of human agents that enable a company to support its customers in real time.