Can AIOps Transform Your IT Operations?

Can AIOps Transform Your IT Operations?

The task of managing an organization's IT operations can be overwhelming. Now, IT leaders are looking to artificial intelligence (AI) to take the pressure off.

Today's infrastructure is a dynamic mix of on-premises and multi-cloud environments running on virtualized servers, said Rodrigo de la Parra, AIOPS Domain Leader at IBM during a recent CanadianCIO Virtual Roundtable. Traditional management solutions cannot monitor the entire system, which makes it difficult to detect issues before they affect customers.

"The amount of information from all the instruments is skyrocketing," de la Parra said. "We have to reduce the noise and empower the operations teams to do what they do best."

The answer lies in applying artificial intelligence to IT operations (AIOPS), de la Parra said. "It allows you to improve the efficiency of IT operations," he said. "Our goal is to reduce labor intensive work so that the team can focus on the more valuable projects that accelerate change."

What is AIOps?

AIOPS is a platform that leverages AI, machine learning, big data from a variety of sources, and natural language processing, De La Parra explained. When combined with automation, "it allows IT teams to scale mundane activities efficiently," he said.

The platform provides visibility into performance data across all environments. It analyzes behavioral data to detect anomalies, alerts IT staff to problems, their root causes, and recommends solutions. De la Parra said that as systems and machine learning mature, AIOps can solve issues without human intervention. “It is a domain agnostic platform that provides a holistic approach and identifies issues in real time,” de la Parra said. "There are no blind spots."

The system relies on a centralized data lake as a "single source of truth," de la Parra said. He said it can analyze structured and unstructured data without the need for tagging. AI models use a data source to build a baseline of the system's performance so that it can spot any deviations.

Typically, the platform can be trained in three or four weeks, de la Parra said. It has an accuracy rate of 80 to 90 percent depending on the quality of the data.

What are the benefits of AIOps?

Individual management tools may not resolve critical events intelligently or correlate data across different environments. With AIOps, IT operations teams gain real-time insights and predictive analytics to respond rapidly to issues. De la Parra said it also makes it easier to meet user and customer service level requirements. "The system enables them to move from a reactive to a proactive approach."

The platform minimizes false positives and the noise created by massive amounts of data. It also poses compliance risks, de la Parra said. He said that AIOps is not just for operations. It can also be used to analyze new implementations to prevent potential problems.

Ultimately, one of the biggest benefits is that AIOps gives time back to the IT operations team. "It gives them a better work-life balance so they can focus more on valuable issues," de la Parra said. "When you put all the pieces together to optimize performance and reliability, it makes IT operations a better partner for the business."