In our previous blog post, we discussed how AIOps functionality has been used primarily in support of IT Ops processes that enable monitoring or observation of IT infrastructure, application behavior or digital experience.
IT Ops teams need solutions to help them throughout their deductive problem-solving processes — accelerating resolution by streamlining investigation and collaborating across teams, quickly identifying root cause, and automating remediation. Instead of spending their time treating recurring symptoms, they should attack problems at their core. IT practitioners from multiple disciplines can all work from a single source of truth to properly identify next steps and assign teams to execute remediation when an issue occurs. This can lead to cases where remediation steps can be automated, without IT intervention, further reducing MTTR.
“Gartner anticipates that, over the next five years, wide-scope domain-agnostic AIOps platforms and narrow-scope domain-centric AIOps tools such as ITIM, APM or ITSM suites will become the two paths for delivering AIOps functionality.”
The key is selecting a platform with an ability to perform event correlation based on a native, deep understanding of the IT infrastructure components and dependencies. It should be domain-aware as well as IT service-aware — it should know how the infrastructure works in order to determine logical relationships. Understanding how these individual monitored elements support a critical service at any given point in time helps to prioritize the most important issues to investigate and resolve first.
Road to AIOps Adoption
Investments into AIOps platforms have been justified on the basis of their ability to decrease mean time to problem resolution and the resultant cost reduction. And they have also been justified regardless of whether this takes the form of using machine learning to:
- Reduce event volumes and false alarms
- Detect anomalous values in time-series data
- Perform root-cause analysis using bytecode instrumentation or distributed tracing data along with graph analysis in an APM context
Traditional point tools can only allow IT teams to get hardware-specific data they control and manage. In many cases, the ability to streamline IT operations is the most advantageous part of the business case for modern IT monitoring. By providing an end-to-end view of the infrastructure, administrators can more quickly highlight risks and pinpoint the source of any given issue. Time spent finger-pointing and firefighting is also reduced as individual administrators are empowered to single-handedly identify and resolve availability and performance concerns.
Whether you are in the midst of creating a completely new environment for your IT department or reevaluating monitoring tools and the potential of hosted IT services, you need AIOps solutions like Zenoss, purposefully built for taming the most complex, modern IT environments. To learn more about AIOps, download the 2019 Gartner Market Guide for AIOps Platforms.
