Challenged to manage IT environments that are highly complex, organizations looking to better identify and resolve service outages can do so more effectively with artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps).
It not only simplifies IT operations management, but also drives and automates problem resolution in environments today that often comprise of on-premises and multiple cloud deployments.
As organizations expand, their IT operations team often has to deal with a complicated web of systems that run both legacy and cloud-native applications, as well as various monitoring tools and work processes. Large data volumes also will have to move across the different environments.
Furthermore, running hybrid multi-cloud environments creates numerous interdependencies that could change rapidly, making them difficult to document and track.
Traditional domain-based IT management solutions are unable to intelligently sort significant events amid this complexity. They cannot correlate data across different interdependent environments or provide IT operations teams real-time insights and predictive analysis to quickly respond to issues, so customer service level can be maintained.
By applying AI to IT operations, tapping big data analytics and machine learning capabilities, AIOps enables organizations to collect and aggregate volumes of operations data generated by IT infrastructure components, applications, and performance-monitoring tools.
It offers the intelligence to filter meaningful signals from the noise to identify patterns and events related to system performance and availability. It facilitates rapid diagnosis of root causes, so organizations can quickly respond and roll out the appropriate remediation. In some instances, issues can be automatically resolved without human intervention.
With AIOps, organizations can replace multiple separate and manual operations tools with one intelligent automated IT operations platform. Their IT operational teams then will be armed with the ability to proactively respond to system slowdowns and outages with significantly less effort.
Without these capabilities, DevOps teams will struggle to cope with the deluge of system alerts from multiple systems that may not even provide an accurate incident assessment. Lacking the ability to effectively investigate and troubleshoot, DevOps managers risk overlooking critical issues that can result in service outages and cost millions in lost revenue and brand damage.
Holistic visibility enables more effective monitoring, incident response
Swedish government organization Blekinge Regional Council understands this challenge and the need to address it. It previously operated a complex environment comprised of various IT systems and monitoring tools, and lacked the ability to respond to alerts in a systematic and coordinated way.
Blekinge Regional Council's IT team had to keep a close watch of all IT systems and applications running across its internal units, with no centralized view of the organization's environment. Monitoring tools were not integrated, leading to duplication of work and longer resolution time. The IT team also had to manually correlate alerts with telemetry and operate without a structured way of distinguishing between false and true alarms.
To address these issues, Blekinge Regional Council worked with IBM Business Partners Atea and Compose IT Nordic to deploy the Compose Operation Platform on IBM's Watson AIOps Event Manager application. This IBM solution is now part of Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps.
The system provides a single solution with which Blekinge Regional Council can monitor its IT systems, and includes enhancements such as dynamic event management, dashboard visualization, and event routing capabilities.
With greater visibility of its systems, the Swedish government organization reduced the number of alerts it needed to respond to since irrelevant and unimportant ones were filtered out. Alerts also were escalated to the correct employee to resolve, reducing incident response times and the need to manually manage alarms.
IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps adopts a unique application-centric approach to IT operations that enable customers to automate labor-intensive IT processes and proactively mitigate critical events. It delivers visibility into performance data and dependencies across different environments.
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IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps offers predictive incident management that not only detects hidden anomalies and anticipates issues, but also resolves these faster. It empowers organizations to preempt risks so any potential impact on both the business and user can be mitigated.
The IBM solution taps AI to analyze data and unearth potential issues, offering suggested resolutions that save time and cost. It also monitors incoming data feeds, such as logs, metrics, and alerts, and highlights potential issues based on pre-trained machine learning models.
Built on Red Hat OpenShift, Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps learns continuously to improve how it handles future system problems. Its machine learning capabilities can adapt based on learnings from analytics and change or create new algorithms to identify problems earlier and recommend more effective solutions.
AI models also can help the system learn about and evolve to changes in the environment, such as new infrastructure provisioned or reconfigured by the DevOps team.
IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps was able to help one Taiwanese computing company uncover 965 anomalies from its network router logs, ahead of its previous detection tool. The computing company was experiencing intermittent application access issues due to network or router failure.
IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps helped the Taiwanese customer cut its detection time by 55% to five minutes and reduce, by 100 times, the level of alert noise.
IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps taps machine learning and natural language understanding to establish links between both structured and unstructured data across your operations toolchain. This delivers valuable insights that enable your IT ops team to identify root causes more quickly.
It also eradicates the need for multiple dashboards, feeding recommendations directly to your team workflows to speed up incident resolution.
In addition, each IBM Cloud Pak is powered by common AI and automation components, providing highly secured integrations between these solutions. This means you can build once and reuse them across your business and IT operations, further demonstrating the value every IBM Cloud Pak brings to your organization.
Estimate how intelligent automation and AIOps can boost your organization’s bottom line with this free benefits calculator.
