Knowledge Graphs for IT Operations — Part 1 — Insights
This is going to be a multi-part series that explains how enterprise IT can benefit from a knowledge graph. Before that, to know what Knowledge Graph is, refer the following link:
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/knowledge-graph
TL;DR — A Knowledge graph is a system that stores knowledge of different systems with their relationships. It helps to discover facts and relationships between different real-world entities. Let’s see this in the context of enterprise IT operations. Enterprise IT consists of Applications that are hosted in specific infrastructure and comprises various software components that serve certain features of a business process that provides specific business value to the organization.
Huh… bored already…. wait… let’s take an example…
Company Aqua Purifier is a multi-national organization into manufacturing and distributing water purifiers. They have a home-grown application — Aquantory hosted in the AWS cloud. It serves as an Inventory management system for their products. Aquantory is a monolith java application that uses MySQL database.
Aquantory is used to control, store, and keep track of their inventory items. It is an essential component of their supply chain management, as it regulates all the operations that are involved from the moment raw materials enter their manufacturing unit and are dispatched as finished goods. Now let’s look at the knowledge graph of Aquantory.
What we see here is a visualization aspect of the knowledge graph that depicts an application that helps one to understand the facts and relationship of the application from various contexts.
As a business user, you will be able to understand the context of the application in the larger enterprise from the business process it supports and the value chain it belongs to, and the users who benefit from it.
As a Technical Architect, you will be able to understand the application from the architectural point of view. You will be able to understand the components of the application like the database it is connected to, modules or services it contains, etc
Thus, a knowledge graph replaces traditional static documents that depict the functional and technical details of an application much more intuitive way.
When a knowledge Graph is configured to receive the information in real time, the insights are much more beneficial. It helps enterprise users to get insights on demand.
Some of the benefits of knowledge graph:
- Provides visibility of available business services/capabilities
- Understanding of business-critical technical components
- Visibility of IT asset inventory (Enhanced CMDB)
- Aids in Incident management and RCA
- Aids to decision making during Change Management with the visibility of impacted IT systems
- Aids in determining the scope of IT systems to be tested as part of a Release
Thus Knowledge graph can act as a Digital SME for modern enterprises.
In this blog, we just scratched the surface to understand the advantages of Knowledge graphs. In the following series, we will unfold how it can power IT Operations that transform ITOps into AIOps.
