Modern digital businesses adopt AIOps tools to enable continuous insights across an IT stack. These insights tell the full story of what’s happening behind systems, allowing IT teams to achieve the operational efficiencies and high availability that lead to customer satisfaction.
Old siloed monitoring disciplines provide data specific to performance of the digital experience, IT infrastructure, application or network. But this data is separated and leaves significant gaps when trying to paint a full picture of a system’s performance. Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps), on the other hand, breaks down these silos, converging disciplines to provide a more comprehensive solution.
This was the theme of a recent strategic advisory session, “Gartner’s Vision for AIOps in 2022 and Beyond,” presented by Lead Gartner Analyst Pankaj Prasad. During his talk, Prasad discussed the criticality of AIOps as companies continue to adopt new technologies and how the industry will grow in the coming years.
“Connecting the dots to convey a story is where we see a lot of organizations lean towards the AIOps platform,” according to Prasad.
AIOps cuts across the three domains of IT Operations:
- Observe (Monitoring): Do we know what’s happening? AIOps offers real-time and historical data by analyzing events metrics, traces and topology and administers data analysis, anomaly detection, performance analysis and correlation and contextualization.
- Engage (IT service Management): What’s happening within IT, and how does it relate to the end-user? AIOps provides notifications about incidents, dependencies and changes and covers task automation, change risk analysis, SD Agency performance analysis and knowledge management.
- Act (Automation): What are we doing within the IT Operations space? AIOps supports scripts, runbooks and application release automations (ARAs).
Simply put: from a monitoring perspective, AIOps looks at the kinds of data captured and, more importantly, deals with what it means and how it should be viewed. For IT service management (ITSM), the technology plays a critical role in overseeing incidents and leveraging existing knowledge to enhance the user experience through better performance and productivity. And, in the meantime, automation drives deep insights into the data.
The future of AIOps
Maintaining uptime and peak performance is getting more complicated as the business world becomes more digital and continues shifting to the cloud. Consequently, AIOps — with its ability to fix faster and more comprehensively — is becoming more mainstream. Some large enterprises even employ senior vice presidents of AIOps. The scope of AIOps is also spreading with DevOps practitioners using the technology as a key part of their application development pipelines.
As the AIOps market matures, IT teams will refine the technology’s algorithms. “I call the algorithm that enhances AIOps a ‘black box’ since we haven’t seen IT Operations personnel questioning what’s happening with the back-end model,” said Prasad. “But there are indicators of the so-called ‘black box’ opening up and end-users maturing to a point where they are ready to ask questions about what’s happening in the analytics layer, how the process is working and how the outcomes can be better.”
Businesses will also turn to AIOps platforms as their sole monitoring tool. Until recently, monitoring tools specialized in extracting data from sources, while AIOps platforms were based on a push mechanism where they waited for the source to send the data. But now AIOps Businesses will also turn to AIOps platforms as their sole monitoring tool as platforms are learning toward natively acquiring data and analyzing it. These merging capabilities make an AIOps platform a business’s only required tool.
But this is just the beginning of the AIOps revolution, according to Phil Tee, co-founder of Moogsoft.
“Bill Gates once said, ‘We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.’ That’s where we are with AIOps. People understand it’s a key cornerstone of any digital strategy, but this is just the beginning.” Tee continued, “we’re at innings two of nine. Only 14-15% of workloads have shifted to the cloud. Imagine when that number gets to 30-40%. This is why I’m so excited about the next five years of this journey.”
To learn more about AIOps today, download the 2021 Gartner Market Guide for AIOps Platforms. Then sign up for a free trial of Moogsoft’s AIOps platform to try it yourself!
