Revolutionize IT Operations with AI
In a previous article in this series, we focused on Making Your Data and Enterprise Ready for AI.
A key component of that focused on the ever-increasing amount of data that is flowing into the enterprise. Organizations are facing similar challenges handling data from Application monitoring, log files, network performance, among other types when they look internally at their IT Operations. Traditional methods for handling IT Operations are beginning to fail due to the fact that IT environments are exceeding the human scale. It is necessary to look at new ways to handle IT Operations. AIOps addresses the challenges that organizations face in their day to day IT Operations, and the need for an AI-infused IT Operations solution has never been greater. Gartner predicts that “By 2024, 30% of business leaders will rely on AI Ops platforms for automated insights to drive business-related decisions, as compared to less than 3% today…”
Current challenges and their consequences
Current methods for handling IT Operations in a manual manner simply no longer work. Companies have been struggling with the volume of data, false alerts, and overwhelming system failures for years, and it continues to get worse. Due to the demand for better client experiences both internally and externally, there is a growing need to ensure reactions to negative IT events are handled in real-time, if not proactively. Current reporting/monitoring tools are no longer sufficient for day to day operations as there is no ability to predict outages or issues based on trends or patterns. It is not enough to simply alert operations personnel that an outage has occurred, it’s imperative that recommendations are also included in order to speed time to recovery, and reduce the load on IT personnel. Finally, organizations have adopted cloud-native approaches that focus on the usage of containers and distributed storage and compute, which makes centralizing alerts and responses to alerts a monumental task. The sheer amount of machine-generated data from all of these sources is impossible to control with the limited, and decreasing resources that IT Operations possesses.
The consequences of not adopting a modernized strategy to handling IT Operations are huge. On Average, organizations see 2,000+ incidents per month. Nine of these will be severe. Each costing the organization $139k on average. Major outages can cost upwards of $439K. The cost to employ the extensive amount of personnel to monitor these systems is also prohibitive ($1.2M per service). With mounting costs and increasing outages, organizations need to get a handle on how to better respond to systems issues.
The skill distribution in organizations are concentrated to a select few employees, which puts immense pressure on an organization during incidents; 10% of the personnel hold 90% of the skills. Without AIOps each incident takes 4hrs and 53 minutes to resolve, requires 17 steps to rectify, needs the involvement of 10 FTEs, and costs $139k on average. WITH AIOps, each incident takes 14 mins to resolve, requires 4 steps to rectify, needs the involvement of 1 FTE, and costs $6k on average. Organizations that adopt AIOps can handle more incidents, in less time, and save their organization thousands of dollars per incident.
To be successful in the future, an organization requires:
· The ability to connect all dots across the enterprise by providing a clear view of all anomalies through the integration of all data types both unstructured and structured
· Automation to improve efficiency
· The ability to monitor and react in real-time by allowing teams to more quickly diagnose and resolve mission-critical issues.
· The freedom to continue using their tools of choice, while adding modern solutions for ChatOps
· Deliver traceable AI to help teams and stakeholders trust AI-powered recommendations and insights for their mission-critical workloads.
· Leverage clear, succinct recommendations, and actions to help teams find solutions, fast.
· Deploy pre-trained AI models tuned by data from your existing IT monitoring tools to give your teams valuable new insights specific to their environments.
Organizations that leverage an AIOps approach will be able to focus on results, not outages. They will be able to thrive in today’s dynamic business climate by achieving new levels of efficiency and resiliency in their IT operations. Additionally, reduce monitoring time and resolve complex problems quickly, so their teams can focus on what matters.
Learn more at https://www.ibm.com/watson/aiops-overview/
John Emmert leads Global Sales and Strategy for IBM Information Architecture within IBM Data and AI. Lives in Raleigh, NC. He is married to his wife Sarah, and has 3 boys, Jack (7), Liam (7), Cormac (1).
