AIOps

What is AIOps?

Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) applies AI and related technologies like machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to traditional IT operations management activities and tasks.

According to Gartner, AIOps combines big data and machine learning to automate IT operations processes, including event correlation, anomaly detection, and causality determination.

How to select an AIOps tool?

To extract the most value out of an AIOps tool, an organization should deploy it either as an independent platform or as an addition to the existing IT operations software. It should imbibe data from all monitoring sources, and act as a central system of IT management. There are five key dimensions of IT operations monitoring that your AIOps tool should fully automate and streamline

Data selection

• The AIOps tool should ingest massive amounts of everyday operations data generated by a modern IT ecosystem and select the right data elements that indicate issues. This kind of filtering requires the AIOps tool to cut through the noise and weed out most of the data, and select only the sets that are relevant.

Pattern discovery

• The AIOps tool should be capable of sifting through the massive data lakes, correlating data sets, and detecting relationships between the selected data elements. It should also be able to group them for further machine intelligence-based analytics.

Inference

• Also called root cause analysis (RCA). The AIOps solution should be capable of identifying the root causes of problems and recurring issues so that you can take appropriate action and suggest the right remedies.

Collaboration

• Another must-have feature in an AIOps tool is the ability to notify appropriate teams, and facilitate collaboration. This is crucial when the IT operations teams are distributed across different geographies and time zones. This will also help IT Ops personnel gain more context while working on similar problems in the future.

Automation

• The AIOps tool should excel in automating response and remediation processes as much as possible, as most IT Ops incidents are time-sensitive and should not impact the business flow or productivity. Strong automation capabilities also make solutions more precise and quick.

Benefits of AIOps

The main benefit of adopting AIOps is that it gives Ops teams the speed and agility they need to ensure the uptime of critical services and the delivery of an optimal digital customer experience. It’s been hard for Ops pros to accomplish this, due to brittle rules-based processes, the creation of silos due to specialization, and above all, too much repetitive manual activity. Here are more details about the benefits of AIOps:

• AIOps remove noise and distractions enabling busy IT specialists to focus on what’s important and not be distracted by irrelevant alerts. This speeds up the detection and resolution of service-impacting issues and prevents outages that hurt sales and the customer experience.

• By correlating information across multiple data sources AIOps eliminates silos and provides a holistic, contextualized vision across the entire IT environment – infrastructure, network, applications, and storage — on-premises and in the cloud.

• By facilitating frictionless, cross-team collaboration between different specialists and service owners, AIOps accelerates diagnosis and resolution times, minimizing disruption to end-users.

• Advanced machine learning captures useful information in the background and makes it available in context to further improve the handling of future incidents.

• Through knowledge recycling and root cause identification, the workflows for solving recurring incidents can be automated, moving Ops teams closer to a ticketless and self-healing environment.

Where Does AIOps Fit into the Modern IT Environment?

When looking at AIOps for the first time, it is not immediately obvious how it fits into existing tool categories. This is because AIOps do not replace existing monitoring, log management, service desk, or orchestration tools. Instead, it sits at the intersection of these domains, integrating information across all of them and providing useful output to ensure a synchronized picture is available.

These tools are valuable in their own right, but it's hard to access the right piece of information at the right time. Hard-coded integration logic struggles to keep pace with the rate of change in modern IT environments. AIOps provides a much more flexible approach to assembling all of these different partial views into a single comprehensive understanding of what is actually important for IT Ops teams to know about.

As such, an AIOps platform plays the role of organizing and integrating what an organization’s domain-specific IT monitoring and management tools do, intelligently integrating the stack’s functionalities. The AIOps platform acts as the brain that brings together these tools and becomes a coordinating, central layer.

AIOps Integration

An AIOps platform integrates with existing ITSM tools and processes, bringing together information, insights, and capabilities that were previously siloed. IT teams use multiple tools for different purposes. Each one is valuable to a specific team or function, but access to each tool and to its insights and data is limited. Instead of engaging in tool rationalization initiatives to shoehorn individual needs into one-size-fits-all solutions, AIOps ties them all together and delivers seamlessly shared visibility across all tools, teams, and domains.

In the same way, AIOps improves and enables ITSM by ensuring that only real, actionable incidents are created, and by avoiding duplication. There is no need to discard the experience embedded in each organization’s ITIL-based processes.

Finally, AIOps brings automation into the fold as well, integrating orchestration and run books, and making them directly available to operators as partial or full automation. IT organizations have typically developed large libraries of automated solutions over the years, but need to ensure that they are triggered only by the correct conditions. AIOps ensures that this is the case, minimizing risk and maximizing the value of existing investments in automation.

To conclude, AIOps is a critical component of today's IT operations management. It is more of a logical addition to your existing monitoring software and helps you manage your entire operations ecosystem from a single window.