How to Predict and Avoid IT Problems and Outages with AIOps

To succeed as digital companies, enterprises need to reconsider their IT ops strategy, including how they think about application and network uptime. System downtime, although common, is no longer acceptable. With business-critical applications as indispensable as the electricity powering office environments, it’s crucial to avoid system outages and the associated business impact.

We all know the difficulties of monitoring dynamic and ever-changing IT environments. Traditional IT operations management processes and assets are ill-equipped to address the challenges of today’s multi-layered, disparate hybrid IT infrastructure, with its extensive set of applications and services (including third party/outsourced ones) and multiple actors. Outdated domain-centric tools force manual data processing by human IT specialists to correlate thousands and thousands of disparate data points, creating painful bottlenecks that prevent the rapid diagnosis and resolution of system issues.

Improve the visibility of your IT environment and its activities with AIOps

Digital applications generate a huge volume, variety and velocity of data. This flood of data can generates a vast number of alerts that need to be analyzed and addressed, with only a few requiring actions. How can an IT team find relevant information in so much system noise?

What if there was a solution that could automate big data analytics analysis and build an accurate, real-time view of all the moving parts across your hybrid IT environment? With the insight provided, you could minimize false alarms/redundant events (system noise), identify anomalies, and more accurately identify probable causes of system incidents.

That solution is Artificial intelligence systems for IT operations (AIOps) solutions -- software systems that combine big data analytics solutions, visualization, and AI/machine learning functionality to automate IT operational tasks such as performance monitoring and event data correlations. The term was coined by analyst firm Gartner in 2017, and they recommend AIOps to organizations as an enhancement to application performance monitoring (APM) and network performance monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD) tools.

How does it work? By correlating millions of data points across all IT domains, and applying machine learning to detect patterns, AIOps provides a consolidated overview and interpretation of what’s happening across the entire stack. IT ops team can then use the information to uncover and resolve the root causes of outages and performance issues so system availability is increased.

Augment your IT operations with AIOps for better system reliability

Because of its underlying importance to the enterprise, IT teams are under pressure to maintain system availability and performance. With the average cost of system downtime approaching $300,000-400,000 per hour, many enterprises and service providers are adopting solutions such as AIOps to avoid network/server disruptions and minimize their impact. The insight provided by AIOps can help IT teams do their job better and more efficiently.

It’s important to note here that AIOps systems aren’t necessarily meant to replace existing IT service management tools and personnel. Rather, AIOps can augment IT environments, serving as the glue that binds disparate systems together and helps IT teams make sense of the constant flow of data. The goal is to simplify and streamline IT operations management, improve system reliability, and automate tedious manual processes for faster problem resolution.

Many AIOps solutions can work with legacy IT resources and tools, integrating with existing business applications such as ERP and correlating information previously locked in siloes. By ingesting and consolidating information across the IT environment, an AIOps platform can provide an updated, accurate, synchronized view of IT operations. Staff can then spot and react to pertinent issues in real time.

Identify and Resolve IT Problems Before They Happen

Some AIOps platforms can also aid configuration planning, helping IT teams anticipate how system changes might impact the IT environment. Whether you’re planning a technology upgrade, migrating to the cloud, or installing patches, an AIOps platform can maintain an accurate and updated view into system assets, applications, dependencies, and the underlying infrastructure. This information can help you plan for and mitigate potential issues with the updates – before they cause an outage.

Conclusion: Better IT and Business Performance with AIOps

AIOps can ease the difficulty IT teams have in managing their increasingly complex IT environment and keeping it running at peak performance. By providing an end-to-end view across all domains, AIOps solutions can enable rapid data anomaly detection and investigation of IT incidents, quicker root cause analysis, and automated data analysis, enabling optimized IT systems uptime for better business results.