AIOps: what is it, when to use it and how to get started? – RTInsights

AI has helped automate many tasks – from document processing to warehouse assembly lines and health scans, but what about automating IT operations? This is one of the most recent frontiers of AI, and it is widely recognized. Enter AIOps.

There are many “Ops” out there today – be it AIOps, MLOps, ModelOps or DevOps, but to be clear, Artificial Intelligence for AI Operations (AIOps) leverages the learning and big data to monitor IT operations, such as event correlation, outlier detection, and determining the root cause of problems. The ultimate goal is to increase the efficiency of IT operations. According to Gartner, “large enterprises’ exclusive use of AIOps and digital experience monitoring tools to monitor applications and infrastructure will increase from 5% in 2018 to 30% in 2023.”

The rise of AIOps is timely. With a major shortage of technical skills plaguing companies in many different industries, the use of AIOps by DevOps teams can play a crucial role, helping them to ensure the quality of the software they develop and deliver.

Another reason AIOps is growing in popularity is the plethora of data organizations collect – across departments and roles and externally from vendors and partners. It may be impossible for IT professionals to mine all of this data without the assistance of AI. AIOps platforms consume and analyze the ever-increasing amount, type, and speed of computer-generated data and present it in useful ways.

AIOps allows them to make sense of that data and automate operations in critical IT operations functions:

• Data selection. Identify the most crucial information from the vast amounts of data.
• Event Correlation: Correlate and find relationships between events across the computing spectrum, then analyze them.
• Inference. Identify the root cause of recurring problems
• Collaboration. Communicate and share information with various team members within the DevOps organization.
• Resolution. Automatic problem solving.

Along with the increasing complexity of IT operations and the shortage of IT talent, the traditional IT operations team has changed drastically over the past few years due to the pandemic. Many IT staff have moved to a remote or hybrid work environment, which adds complexity. AIOps ensures that this type of change does not affect smooth and consistent IT operations.

See also: Why digital transformation drives the need for AIOps

Best Practices for Adopting AIOps

For companies looking to integrate AIOps into their IT process infrastructure, here are some key considerations.

• Get company-wide buy-in. Deploying AIOps is a form of digital transformation not just within an IT team, but something that affects an entire business. It’s important to educate business leaders on the role of ITOps so they can evangelize the rest of the business and instill the value of automation and digital innovation.
• Audit your data. AIOps is all about data. You will need access to all data, including unstructured data, in logs, real-time data, API outputs, and device data, as well as structured business data in databases , social sites and other sources. The more relevant data you have, the more accurate your AIOps predictions will be.
• Take incremental steps. As with any digital transformation, it’s important to start small. Test using AIOps, gather feedback from IT teams as you go, and improvise accordingly.
• Document the process. For an effective AIOps to be deployed, it must understand how the process has always been. It is important to document the standard operating procedures, workflows and steps that were followed.
• Understand the costs. It is important to consider that there will be costs for licensing the AIOps solution, the hardware it will reside on, as well as installation and training costs.
• Examine the vendors. Some companies only provide algorithms, and others provide the full continuum of services. It is important to determine what your needs are and to understand not only the technical qualifications of the AIOps solution provider, but also their understanding of your industry and business environment.
• Make sure it is scalable. Since it’s important to start small with any digital transformation initiative, you need to ensure that the solution you choose can scale to meet the new demands of your IT department.

As the complexity of IT operations keeps pace with business urgency, there is little wiggle room for system, application, and network downtime. Companies that have implemented AIOps have experienced less system downtime, faster issue resolution times, and early problem detection. More importantly, it enables a better user experience for both IT teams and end users.