Digital transformation drives complexity in IT

Introduction to AIOps

Today, we live and work in a digital economy that is becoming more and more vulnerable. Companies have come to rely on increasingly complex IT infrastructure, software applications, and microservices to drive revenue and improve productivity and business outcomes. This holds true across industries but especially in technology, banking and finance, manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, service management, retail and e-commerce, public sector, and healthcare. As the IT ecosystem of companies becomes more agile, complex, the IT operations' challenges increase exponentially.
 
Businesses have been ill-equipped to deal with looming technical issues and operations management challenges which have caused many to lose revenue or incur significant costs. No longer can information technology operation professionals rely on traditional methods.
 
To address problems before the business is impacted companies must make a shift towards intelligent automation. Artificial Intelligence is the new driver for transforming traditional ITOps into AIOps. Here we give you an introduction to what AIOps is, why you should adopt it, and how it can be applied to your own operations.
 
In this guide, we explain how the key capabilities of AIOps ("elements of a house") must be built from the bottom up where the foundation for the building (or “floor”) is quality data collection. Without the ability to harvest quality data, it's impossible to build the "house" with sound and solid "walls," and a "roof." When it comes to AIOps, what you put in, is what you get out. So, it's imperative that you use quality data as a foundation.
AIMS AIOps building blocks
Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations

What is AIOps?

Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, is a term coined by Gartner. AIOps is powered by two core technologies that continue to go through a riveting pace of development, Big Data and Machine Learning (ML). 

The availability of Big Data and Machine Learning capabilities powers the massive computing required to analyze the thousands, millions, and billions of data points and log files harvested by AIOps tools. Using smart machine learning algorithms, and artificial intelligence, AIOps gathers and analyzes data from different sources and automatically identifies issues through the multiple IT layers and across the stack to ultimately trigger intelligent remediation. 

Learn more about AIOps in this article.

AIOps 1
Traditional IT Operations setup is broken

Why do you need AIOps?

The use of artificial intelligence is becoming a necessity for DevOps teams and operations teams. As businesses go digital their use of more complex technologies, cloud platforms can put them at risk of failing with crucial governance and monitoring requirements. Failure will impact the corporate Profit & Loss through revenue- and productivity loss. 
 
Here are a number of benefits of AIOps:
 
  • Effective AIOps can help you identify situations you would otherwise not capture.
  • Address performance issues automatically preventing the need for middle-of-the-night emergency wake-up calls, accelerate incident response in case of an outage and easily get to the root cause of problems.
  • Prioritization of notifications that helps you focus only on those that matter.
  • Reduction in detection and repair time.
  • Obtain improved operational visibility.
  • AIOps enables advanced analytics in real-time including causal analytics to address problems faster.
  • AIOps brings recommendations that are data-driven, making use of both real-time and historical data.
  • Reduce or eliminate costly and time-consuming human errors. 
  • Automate IT operations and free up IT capacity from mundane, repetitive tasks.
  • AIOps provide improved visibility to deploy code faster.
Benefits of AIOps
The 5 (+1) Building Blocks

What the building blocks are?

AIOps combines several basic capabilities (or building blocks) from collecting data to taking action. AIOps allows IT operations to employ a system that makes sense out of the data and makes it easy to act on. These five (+1) capabilities — each one delivering incremental value — should initially be implemented sequentially with later iterations.
 
Just as when building a house you need a floor, walls, a ceiling, and a roof, these capabilities must function together in order to fully capture the value of AIOps. That said, an intelligent self-healing AIOps with comprehensive data and system coverage (observability) is likely a few years away. Self-healing IT is today in use but for selective systems and data sets. As the type and scope of data increase the predictability drops and increased intelligence is required.
 
Junk in - junk out...

AIOps Capability 1: Data Harvesting (floor)

If you're trying to envision where the five capabilities of AIOps fit into a business, it starts with data harvesting. As the "floor" of the AIOps infrastructure, data harvesting involves collecting data on a continuous basis - time-series performance metrics and text logs - from multiple data sources.
 
Structuring and normalization of the data is a key capability together with flexibility in the ingestion of APIs. It is all about making sense of data across huge data sets and sources. Hence the ability to flexibly consume, normalize and structure the data for subsequent processing across any sources is fundamental.
AIOps data harvesting
Get the algorithms to work for you

AIOps Capability 2: Learning & Correlation Engine (walls)

If data harvesting is the floor, then the learning and correlation engine represents the two walls of the building. Using the power of AI and machine learning (ML), AIOps learns the normal behavior patterns of the data, identifies and correlates relationships, and makes sense out of a vast amount of events. Using anomaly detection, AIOps detects abnormalities that can lead to significant problems.

AIOps learn and correlate AIMS
Understand the context

AIOps Capability 3: Topology Discovery (walls)

This is another crucial capability that refers to the physical structure, relationships, and dependencies of artifacts or assets in an organization’s IT ecosystem. It can be represented in many layers and business needs - from technical network diagrams to dependency or higher-level business topologies. The ability to navigate through the layers - from & to - technical and business is key to understanding the context, and hence the importance, of any anomaly. This includes infrastructure, systems and applications, and services independent of data center, physical, container, or cloud deployment.
 
The ability to get topology context with anomalies allows a drastic reduction in MTTK (Mean Time To Know) and the MTTR (Mean Time To Respond) beyond anything that humans are capable of doing alone.
Topology discovery AIMS AIOps
Getting to relevant anomalies is a major milestone

AIOps Capability 4: Business Relevant Anomaly Alerts (ceiling)

Business relevant alerts are the "ceiling" of the AIOps architecture and one of the essential AIOps use cases. What’s different about alerts in an AIOps infrastructure is that they do not rely on pre-configured alerting defined by technical teams - rather they rely on algorithms to identify anomalies. This relies on solid data, a sophisticated and robust anomaly detection engine, and context. 
 
The alerts should be prioritized to those that are most relevant to the specific business operation impacted. The insignificant ones should be suppressed automatically. This contributes to eliminating the common notification fatigue that IT teams struggle with when trying to filter through all the noise to get to the most important problems, access root cause analysis, accelerate resolution, and avoid outages before it is too late.
Business Relevant anomaly alerts
Don't underestimate the value of smart dashboards

AIOps Capability (Bonus): Actionable Dashboards

A bonus capability from all the data and actionable insight are dashboards and reports. In practice, the data is real-time business intelligence. Possibly better than any traditional BI tool, real-time with built-in anomaly detection and predictive analytics. 

The ability to leverage this data and insight for reports and dashboards for stakeholders across an organization - from technical to managers and executives will be crucial to the required governance of IT that the profit & loss of businesses rely on.

AIOps Dashboards AIMS Innovation
Its all about taking early action to prevent

AIOps Capability 5: Taking Action (roof)

Last, but certainly not least, taking action with AIOps forms the roof. Every capability before this one enables you to take action whether that action is manual or automated. Once the data from many sources has been harvested, processed by the anomaly detection engine, and analyzed for context-aware, domain agnostic anomalies, then the resulting probable root cause can be identified and acted upon quickly. This may be manual action or automated action by triggering auto-healing scripts.

Taking action backed-up by AI AIMS AIOPS
Analysts agree - AIOps is unavoidable

What Are Others Saying About AIOps Adoption?

While only a small percentage of businesses have taken on AIOps, Gartner predicts that a larger majority will be taking it on in the near future. If you’re not one of those, chances are you’ll be left in the dust as your competitors speed ahead. Here’s how other IT professionals think about AIOps as it pertains to their organizations:
  • 72% rely on up to nine different monitoring tools
  • 47% receive over 50,000 alerts per month.
  • 97% believe AIOps platforms provide valuable insights to help automate and enhance IT operations
  • 90% agree that AIOps is very important for the future of IT operations

 

It’s very difficult for businesses to keep up with the rapid advances in technology. It’s seemingly easier to just stay in your comfort zone, resistant to change, rather than take on something like AIOps. It’s also understandable that you may have little to no knowledge of how to implement it into your IT operations.
 
However, as businesses grow and data increases along with the sources from which it’s collected, so do their technology needs. If you don’t leverage the automation power of artificial intelligence, analytics and machine learning, then you’ll find that your team won’t be able to handle big data. AIOps helps you to nip the issues in the bud before they have a chance to wreak havoc on your IT operations, which can lead to disastrous consequences for your customer experience and overall business.
 
As you can see now, AIOps isn’t just an option or alternative, it’s a must-have. When building a house, you can’t start with the roof without building the right foundation. The foundation is the data that everything else relies on. And AIOps is not an option - it will be a requirement to succeed with digital business. Hence, the question is only how and when you adopt.

Transform your IT Operations with AIMS

The AIMS AIOps platform helps organizations to capture the value of Artificial Intelligence in IT Operations. 
Book a meeting to understand how to validate the value and feasibility of AIOps for your organization without a massive project and intelligently monitor your IT technology stack.
 
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