Engineering teams use a lot of single-domain monitoring tools. In fact, the average team manages and maintains 16 monitoring tools — and up to 40 — according to Moogsoft’s State of Availability Report.
While IT leaders select and implement these tools to save teams time, our research finds they do quite the opposite. Engineers spend far and away more time on monitoring than they do on any other task — innovative, value-creating tasks included.
Still, monitoring solutions are critical. Because the economy runs on technology, digital apps and services must be available around the clock. And that availability is dependent on monitoring tools that constantly comb through mountains of data to find performance-affecting incidents.
The problem is: traditional point monitoring solutions do not work for today’s IT environments. Engineering teams need much more efficient and effective monitoring solutions for better availability outcomes and less toil.
So, what’s the answer? IT teams must connect point solutions with artificial intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps).
The problem with point solutions
By themselves, point solutions only monitor one piece of the IT ecosystem: the IT infrastructure, application, network or digital experience. While this traditional approach hones in on specific aspects of system performance, it cannot keep up with modern availability demands. Here is why:
- Expense: Point solutions are unnecessarily expensive — both in the sheer amount of time teams spend managing and maintaining them and in the multiple licensing fees.
- Information silos: Keeping valuable data siloed in different tools slows information sharing, communication and, ultimately, incident detection and resolution.
- Downtime: By using disparate tools, engineers can miss significant insights into system-wide incidents, and incident timelines naturally lengthen.
How to make your point solutions talk
Engineering teams need to connect otherwise siloed monitoring tools to streamline processes and speed incident detection and resolution. This is where AIOps comes in.
Domain-agnostic AIOps solutions are purpose-built to ingest all types of monitoring data collected from various point solutions. Instead of managing a slew of monitoring tools, engineers can use their AIOps solution to get a single line of sight across the entire IT infrastructure. And the benefits are numerous:
- One platform: AIOps provides a single, streamlined point of interaction for the entire incident lifecycle — from detection and notification through resolution.
- Single dashboard view: Instead of switching from tool to tool and analyzing disparate charts, AIOps platforms summarize the health of all systems and put that summary in one easy-to-see, easy-to-understand dashboard.
- Apply overall intelligence: By reducing alert noise through deduplication and correlation and connecting the tissue between all monitoring alerts, AIOps tools can quickly identify the incident’s root cause and keep engineering teams focused on the most significant, business-impacting issues.
Why Moogsoft isn’t just another tool in the toolbox
Unlike most AIOps vendors, Moogsoft was built to converge data from the entire incident lifecycle and provide companies with a holistic monitoring solution. So, we have domain expertise and (a long list of patents to back that up). We enable true connectivity across monitoring data, allowing for earlier detection, more uptime and less human toil.
We can still hear IT leaders now: I need another tool?!
Yes, but…
- Moogsoft AIOps can identify redundant tools and help teams consolidate their tech stacks.
- Moogsoft AIOps delivers far more value than adding point solutions to fill monitoring gaps.
IT teams already know the importance of availability and, thus, monitoring — that is demonstrated in their immense investment in monitoring tools. But IT leaders struggling to meet modern availability demands despite this investment should resist reaching for yet another resource-intensive monitoring tool. Instead, they should allow a sophisticated AIOps tool to seamlessly connect monitoring data for expedited incident detection and resolution and significantly improved availability outcomes.
