This was written by Leah Zitter, Ph.D.
Problem: You've got this massive data flowing in from multiple sources - Google Cloud, your private cloud, Azure, AWS, or others - flooding you with noise. You simply don't have the time or ability to identify which alert is essential, which to overlook. And that's a pity because you may inadvertently miss something urgently, like an unusual spike in traffic, which could be indicating a possible cybersecurity concern.
That's where AIOps - short for artificial intelligence for IT operations - comes in. These algorithmic operations help you combine ML with big data to troubleshoot and automate IT operations processes.
AIOps Accurately Identifies the Root Cause
AIOps accurately identifies root cause in at least three areas:
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The correlation, or co-occurrence of events, is where AIOps helps you find the common root of several IT processes that are short-circuiting at the same time.
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The topology, or the actual physical connections between items, is where AIOps helps you identify where things started going wrong in one or more items.
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The clustered causes, where if you've got, say, a sequence of events or a cluster of similar events, AIOps helps you identify which of the causal events in this sequence or cluster caused the breakdown.
These three points help you identify where and why things go wrong and rush mean time to detection (MTTD), which means AIOps simply enables you to detect the problem faster than running a manual configuration of the IT system.
AIOps Creates a Single Pane of Glass for Alert Data
You've got data coming in across vectors, such as from Microsoft Azure, your native systems, VPN gateways, Amazon Web Services, and so forth. AIOps helps you cluster this mass of data on one platform.
This makes things easier for systems specialists who simply need to visit alerts on one pane of glass to identify and resolve problems and automate solutions. It helps you see data across environments or, in other words, enables you to put the entire hybrid cloud in one place.
AIOps Offers Intelligent Incident Management
So you've got all this data coming in. What do you do with it? AIOps helps you assign the stream of incoming alerts into relevant groups to resolve the different issues.
Example: AIOps assigns events that show similar patterns to the silo for IT operations management, events that show incident factors to IT service management, and so forth. Each cluster of events is then assigned to a relevant agent.
This improves mean time to recovery (MTTR), helping the right person get the right work done faster. This operation automates your business to become better, faster, and more efficient.
AIOps: Anomaly and Threat Detection
AIOps helps us identify associations and helps us determine if something's wrong in the first place. That's anomaly detection. In other words, AIOps alert us to sudden changes of behavior or a sudden change in data. It looks at values over time and determines if some sort of abnormality is happening.
Example: AIOps tell us if one of our systems is getting an unusual amount of traffic, indicating a possible cyber breach.
AIOps Forecasts Events
AIOps helps with predictive analytics, where it uses data to help us forecast a behavior before it happens.
Example: Unlike in traditional technology, where you hit your storage limit without warning, AIOps warns that (for example), "You're 14 days from hitting 90% capacity."
Forewarned is forearmed.
AIOps Resolves Issues Automatically
Now that AIOps helped you identify the problem, you're able to fix the issue with some sort of scripting or external orchestration (also called runbook automation) to prevent the issue from recurring. In other words, you automate the solution so that processes run faster and more accurately, without the need to reconfigure them each time something goes askew manually.
AIOps: Incident Management
AIOps logs a record of the troubleshooting incident, such as "The system could remediate this problem." Or "We tried x, y, script and finally used z." Such records could help the IT team fix similar disruptions cheaper, faster, and more efficiently. If that solution falls through, all you need to do is retrace your steps to explore alternative solutions.
AIOps for the Future World
AIOps assigns incoming alerts to relevant IT containers, so the right agent can identify the problem, automatically remediate the issue, predict and prevent other adverse events from occurring, and log a record of the event for incident management. AIOps integrates information from multiple sources on one single pane of glass for a system administrator to read and interpret that information more easily.
Put otherwise, AIOps helps you do everything from discovery to resolution and enables you to reduce the time it takes to troubleshoot events, so your business can quickly spring back to operations.
In the World of the Future (that's actually the world of the present), AIOps is the last word in your ability to adjust to unexpected and constantly changing IT environments. With the recent shift to remote work, AIOps helps us understand, troubleshoot, and automate IT processes across enterprises for competitive business value. It's this digitization that's the make or break of our company.
