Coined by Gartner, AIOps—i.e. artificial intelligence for IT operations—is the application of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, such as natural language processing and machine learning models, to automate and streamline operational workflows.
Specifically, AIOps uses big data, analytics, and machine learning capabilities to do the following:
By integrating multiple separate, manual IT operations tools with into a single, intelligent, and automated IT operations platform, AIOps enables IT operations teams to respond more quickly—even proactively—to slowdowns and outages, with end-to-end visibility and context.
It bridges the gap between an increasingly diverse, dynamic, and difficult-to-monitor IT landscape and siloed teams, on the one hand, and user expectations for little or no interruption in application performance and availability, on the other. Most experts consider AIOps to be the future of IT operations management and the demand is only increasing with the increased business focus on digital transformation initiatives.
The journey to AIOps is different in every organization. Once you assess where you are in your journey to AIOps, you can start to incorporate tools which help teams to observe, predict, and act quickly to IT operational issues. As you consider tools to improve AIOps within your organization, you’ll want to ensure that they have the following features:
Observability: Observability refers to software tools and practices for ingesting, aggregating, and analyzing a steady stream of performance data from a distributed application and the hardware it runs on, in order to more effectively monitor, troubleshoot and debug the application to meet customer experience expectations, service level agreements (SLAs) and other business requirements. These solutions can give a holistic view across your applications, infrastructure, and network through data aggregation and consolidation, but do not take corrective action to address IT issues. Although they do not take corrective action to address IT issues, they do collect and aggregate IT data from a variety of data sources across IT domains to alert end users of potential issues, expecting IT service teams to implement the necessary remediation. While the data and corresponding visualizations from these tools are valuable, they create a dependency on IT organizations to make decisions and respond appropriately to technical issues. Resource optimization that requires an operator to manually update operational systems may not see the benefits in dynamic demand situations.
Predictive analytics: AIOps solutions can analyze and correlate data for better insights and automated actions, allowing IT teams to maintain control over the increasingly-complex IT environments and assure application performance. Being able to correlate and isolate issues is a massive step forward for any IT Operations team. It reduces times to detect issues that might not have otherwise been found in the organization. Organizations will reap the benefits of automatic anomaly detection, alerts and solution recommendations, which in turn reduces overall downtime as well as the number of incidents and tickets. Dynamic resource optimization can be automated using predictive analytics, which can assure application performance while safely reduce resource cost even during high variability of demand.
Proactive response: Some AIOps solutions will proactively respond to unintended events, such as slowdowns and outages, bringing application performance and resource management together in real-time. By feeding application performance metrics into predictive algorithms, they can identify patterns and trends that coincide with different IT issues. With ability to forecast IT problems before they occur, AIOps tools can launch relevant, automated process in response, rectifying issues quickly. Organizations will be able to see the benefits from intelligent automation, such as improve mean time to detection (MTTD).
This type of technology is the future of IT operations management as it can help business improve the both the employee and customer experience. Not only do AIOps systems ensure that IT service issues are resolved in a timely manner but they also provide a safety net for IT operation teams, addressing issues that may fall through the cracks due to human oversight, such as organizational silos, under-resourced teams, and more.
The overarching benefit of AIOps is that it enables IT operations to identify, address, and resolve slow-downs and outages faster than they can by sifting manually through alerts from multiple IT operations tools. This results in several key benefits:
Go from reactive to proactive to predictive management: With built-in predictive analytics capabilities, AIOps continuously learns to identify and prioritize the most urgent alerts, letting IT teams address potential problems before they lead to slow-downs or outages. Electrolux accelerated IT-issues resolution from 3 weeks to an hour via faster Meantime to detection (MTTD) and saved more than 1,000 hours per year by automating repair tasks.
AIOps incorporates big data, advanced analytics, and machine learning capabilities to tackle the following use cases:
The easiest way to understand how AIOps works is to review the role that each AIOps component technology—big data, machine learning, and automation—plays in the process.
AIOps uses a big data platform to aggregate siloed IT operations data, teams, and tools in one place. This data can include the following:
AIOps then applies focused analytics and machine learning capabilities:
Continuously automate critical actions in real time—and without human intervention—that proactively deliver the most efficient use of compute, storage and network resources to your apps at every layer of the stack.
Enhance your application performance monitoring to provide the context you need to resolve incidents faster
AIOps Insights is a SaaS solution that addresses and solves for the problems central IT operations teams face in managing the availability of enterprise IT resources through AI-powered event and incident management.
Improve systems management, IT operations, application performance and operational resiliency with artificial intelligence on the mainframe.