Seven Key Capabilities of AIOps

Businesses need to be careful when choosing an AIOps tool. Only good AIOps tools that meet the seven essential requirements can solidify business strategy results and deliver solid and reliable IT operations capabilities.

As enterprise networks continue to evolve, especially with the transition to digital business applications, maintaining service uptime has become a daunting challenge. For example, current services often need to coexist with legacy systems, increasing the complexity of management efforts; over time, the diversity of infrastructure components and service levels often forces us to deploy multiple management tools; the increase in management tools leads to a holistic view The continuity of data becomes more difficult to maintain, and the resulting silos of information also lead to inefficient use of available data all the way.

Complicating matters further, these components are generating more and more events, logs and information, which ultimately overwhelms the IT operations team. Based on these realities, it is increasingly difficult to find the root cause of problems in our infrastructure, or to address them proactively. Not only does this lead to a longer mean time to recovery (MTTR), but it will also lead to lower quality service delivery, ultimately resulting in poor customer experience and overall customer satisfaction.

Fortunately, as challenges arise, so do the methods to solve them. Artificial intelligence technology has brought unprecedented development prospects to AIOps tools and platforms. The functions provided by the AIOps platform are expected to fully meet the complexity and scale requirements of digital transformation proposed by modern business service delivery.

According to Gartner, "AIOps platforms combine big data and machine learning capabilities to ingest and analyze rapidly and disparate amounts of data from IT processes in a scalable manner, thereby supporting core IT operational functions. The platform can simultaneously support multiple data sources, multiple data collection methods, and analysis and presentation technologies."

The best AIOps tools need to aggregate data, extract insights, and ultimately deliver value based on intelligent outputs. So, what are the basic features that an ideal AIOps tool needs? These seven points cannot be ignored.

First, data collection

Look for systems that work perfectly with other solutions. In essence, an enterprise's AIOps solution must be able to collect information from multiple sources, including physical infrastructure components such as services and applications and virtual entities. During deployment, an enterprise's AIOps solution must also be able to interface with existing monitoring tools as well as emerging technologies.

Second, data aggregation

Focus on features that help facilitate cross-domain collaboration. First, an enterprise's AIOps solution needs to be able to aggregate data from IT Infrastructure Monitoring (ITIM), Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM), and Application Performance Monitoring (APM).

Third, data enrichment

Aggregation is the first step in enabling data usage, but to gain real value, our AIOps also need to have the ability to enrich the data collected. AIOps needs to provide a retrospective view through historical data, such as logs and events, and use metadata and tags to enrich the search content in the index.
By overlaying data points with timestamps, we can enrich real-time data such as performance and telemetry information to generate time-series information that is meaningful. In subsequent use of this information, companies can also add appropriate tags to create key-value pairs to unlock the full potential of the data.

Fourth, Analytical Insights

Insights are the core value of AIOps tools. Clearly, the most basic correlation and statistical analysis capabilities alone are not sufficient to allow us to identify complex root causes. Pattern discovery and anomaly detection are key components in a good AIOps system, and can also provide an important enabling basis for driving specification based on insights. In addition to infrastructure operational insights, our AIOps system should analyze the specific impact of infrastructure issues on the business. The resulting Service Level Agreement (SLA) management will help businesses gain tremendous convenience and value when interacting with non-technical stakeholders.

Fifth, automation

Automation can bring extremely high efficiency and effectiveness to the IT operation management system. Therefore, it is best for enterprise AIOps tools to quickly generate and deploy workflows that automate functions. Specifically, the AIOps system should provide options such as automated library maintenance functions and rapid workflow sharing across operational flows. Excellent automation capabilities can not only improve operational agility, but also significantly reduce unexpected errors and greatly enhance service availability.

Sixth, ease of use

Some AIOps platforms provide a cloud-based management layer, which can help IT teams solve the problems of multiple customers at multiple sites simultaneously in a secure, distributed manner, thereby improving management efficiency. By monitoring data pipelines, AIOps platforms can help other tools easily access the collected information, greatly facilitating collaboration across teams.

Seventh, flexible deployment

In terms of service assurance, different enterprises always have different actual situations and specific needs. Therefore, when choosing an AIOps platform, whether self-hosting, remote management, or platform-as-a-service, the AIOps deployment model must be able to meet the unique business and operational needs of the enterprise.

Summary

According to Gartner, by February 2023, 30% of large enterprises will use AIOps platforms. AIOps use cases have proven that existing technologies are fully capable of enabling truly proactive IT operations management functions. The excellent approach it provides will help us maintain a good and proven approach to managing complexity in the face of an evolving infrastructure.

Businesses need to be careful when choosing an AIOps tool. Only excellent AIOps tools that meet the above seven basic requirements can consolidate business strategy results and bring solid and reliable IT operations capabilities.