What is AIOps?

AIOps functions best when it is deployed independently to gather and analyze data from all available IT monitoring sources, providing a centralized system of engagement. To do this, it follows essentially the same process used by the human cognitive function. The five key algorithms at play are as follows:

Combing through the colossal amount of available IT data, evaluating it, and identifying relevant data elements, AIOps must be able to locate the significant ‘needles’ hidden in terabyte-sized data 'haystacks,’ based on predetermined selection and prioritization metrics.

AIOps puts relevant data under the microscope, locating correlations between data elements and grouping them together so that they may be further analyzed.

In-depth analysis allows AIOps platforms to clearly identify root causes of problems, events, and trends, creating clear insights to help inform action.

AIOps must also function as a collaboration platform, notifying the right teams and individuals, providing them with relevant information, and facilitating effective collaboration despite possible distance between operators.

Finally, AIOps is designed to automatically respond to and remediate issues directly, significantly increasing the speed and accuracy of IT operations.

According to a study by Accenture, front-line customer support functions spend up to 12% of their time managing tickets, and 43% of IT service desk respondents are weighed down by having to choose from 100+ assignment groups. Simply put, there is too much data and information for modern IT and service departments to handle effectively. AIOps helps relieve much of this burden.

Here, we address several key benefits of using an AIOps platform:

AIOps combines intelligent automation with big data, uncovering hidden connections and casual data relationships across services, operations, and resources, and delivering actionable insights. The obvious result is improved usability in your data, and a better return from your data analysis activities.

AIOps is a cost-effective alternative to hiring an army of IT staff and data scientists. Additionally, it can significantly reduce the time and attention IT operations teams spend on routine tasks and potentially unimportant alerts. This leads to increased efficiency, and reduced costs overall. Finally, AIOps helps protect businesses from costly service disruptions.

AIOps is both swift and accurate, decreasing error rates while also cutting down on the time to resolution of service impacting issues. At the same time, by breaking down data silos, AIOps offers a single, contextualized view of the entire IT environment. AIOps’ proactive performance monitoring and data analytics allow for faster, better decision making.

Employees are happiest when they have the right tools to do their jobs effectively. AIOps automates a range of important—though repetitive and time consuming—tasks, increasing employee productivity and improving the employee experience.

At its heart, AIOps is a platform designed to intelligently collect and analyze IT operational data. But from these two primary tasks, AIOps becomes an invaluable asset in a variety of actions and solutions. Here are nine popular use cases for AIOps:

AIOps has the capacity to rapidly process and analyze incident alerts, producing solutions before incidents can spiral out of control.

By consistently analyzing data and comparing it to historical trends, AIOps is able to identify data outliers that may be indicative of potential problems.

In addition to early identification of issues, AIOps’ data collection and analysis capabilities are able to employ machine learning to current and historical data trends, creating highly accurate forecasts of future outcomes.

AIOps may also be instrumental in root cause analysis, correlating millions of data points, providing user and business context, tracking event patterns, and more, for accurate diagnoses of potential causes of problems.

AIOps root cause analysis capabilities benefit not only businesses, but also customers. Support agents are able to identify and resolve issues more quickly, providing a better experience to customers. At the same time, IT desks can manage more tickets with greater accuracy.

With the right data and directives, AIOps can be set to automatically address issues as they arise. Automated incident response allows for highly accurate identification, diagnosis, and remediation, much more quickly than is possible with human operators.

By effectively removing the burden of new technologies and complexities from ITOps, AIOps allows for unrestricted digital transformation. Businesses can enjoy the flexibility of embracing new advances to address strategic goals, without having to worry about whether IT is able to handle the increased load.

AIOPs offers clear visibility into the shifting interdependencies of cloud adoption and migration. This significantly reduces the operational risks associated with such a transition.

Finally, by providing effective automation and clear data visibility, AIOps empowers IT to better support the DevOps infrastructure.

Launching AIOps is a task that will require a unique approach depending upon your organization, its capabilities, and its needs. However, there are a few basic steps that are generally common across different businesses.

Depending on your organization, you may face resistance when promoting an AIOps approach. Common barrier to adoption may include the following:

• Absence of team data scientists
• Lack of relevant skills
• Insufficient or low-quality data
• No integrated way to act on insights

Thankfully, the most effective AIOps providers eliminate these issues. ServiceNow provides robust data-science services, supplementing existing skill sets with easy to use tools, and offering valuable next steps. With ServiceNow you don’t need to hire data scientists, and you don’t need to worry about issues preventing successful AIOps adoption.

Help promote management and leadership buyin by creating a business case for AIOps. Identify areas within your IT operations that could be improved upon, and share how AIOps offers reliable, effective solutions.

Choosing an AIOps platform takes an in-depth knowledge of your business and a dedicated amount of research into available options. Recognize that there are many solutions available, so be sure to view demos and read relevant reviews as you make your choice.

Once you’ve chosen your preferred AIOps solution, creating a detailed rollout plan will help ensure that you are making the transition at the correct pace, without wasting time or other resources.

Remember, your employees are most interested in how this new approach will benefit them. Demonstrate how intelligent, predictive self-service can offer predictive support, deflecting cases from agents, and how automation will help eliminate time-consuming, repetitive tasks.