EVERYTHING

YOU NEED TO
KNOW ABOUT
AIOPS
What is AIOps?
AIOps is the application of artificial intelli-
gence for IT operations. It is is the future of
ITOps, combining algorithmic and human
intelligence to provide full visibility into the
state and performance of the IT systems
that businesses rely on.

Successful digital transformation relies on

AIOps to enable IT to operate at the speed
that modern business requires.

Everything You Need to Know Abous AIOps

 An AI Platform For The
Next Decade Of IT
You can’t manage today’s dynamic, con- As network infrastructures evolve, old mod-
stantly changing IT landscape with yester- el-based systems take more and more effort
day’s tools. to maintain, yet still fall further and further
behind.
The ongoing evolution of IT infrastructure
models — moving from static and predict- AIOps uses machine learning and data sci-
able physical systems to software-defined ence to give IT operations teams a real-time
resources that change and reconfigure on the understanding of any issues affecting the
fly — demands equally dynamic technology availability or performance of the systems
and processes for its management. under their care. Gartner first defined the
term in 2016, positioning it at the inter-
section of monitoring, service desk, and
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automation.
2018 AIOps Buyers Guide

How Does AIOps Work?

AIOps works with existing data sources, in- This algorithmic filtering massively reduc-
cluding traditional IT monitoring, log events, es the noise level that IT operations teams
application and network performance anom- would otherwise have to deal with, and
alies, and more. All data from these source also avoids the duplication of work that can
systems are processed by a mathematical occur when redundant tickets are routed to
model that is able to identify significant different teams. Instead, virtual teams can
events automatically, without requiring labo- be assembled on the fly, enabling different
rious manual pre-filtering. A second layer of specialists to “swarm” around an issue that
algorithms analyses these events to identify spans across technological or organisational
clusters of related events that are all symp- boundaries. Existing ticketing and incident
toms of the same underlying issue.
 management systems can take advantage
of AIOps capabilities, integrating directly into
existing processes.

AIOps also improves automation, by enabling

workflows to be triggered with or without
human intervention. ChatOps capabilities
makes existing automation and orchestra-
tion functionality available as an integral part
of the normal collaborative diagnostic and
remediation process. As machine-learning
systems become more and more accurate
and reliable, it becomes possible for routine
and well-understood actions to be triggered
without human intervention, potentially
resolving issues before users are impacted or
even aware of any problem.
5

Everything You Need to Know Abous AIOps

Outage Occurs Unique Situations Situations are
and Thousands are Created from Remediated and
of Alerts are Created Clustered Alerts Service is Restored

Storage

Network L2

Application

Teams Receive
Algorithms Notifications of Knowledge is
Automatically Reduce Situations and Captured and Indexed
and Cluster Alerts Collaborate for Future Re-Use

Integrates Across Your Entire Ecosystem

 How Does AI Help Human
Operators?
The pace and volume of change demands The “AI” in AIOps does not mean that human
automation of routine tasks, to preserve operators will be replaced by automated
valuable human intelligence for less frequent, systems. Instead, humans and machines
unpredictable, and high-value activities. operate together, with algorithms augment-
AIOps combines automation of tactical activ- ing human capabilities and enabling them to
ities with strategic oversight by expert users, focus on what is meaningful.
instead of wasting the time and expertise of
skilled IT Operations personnel on “keeping
the lights on”.

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2018 AIOps Buyers Guide
How to Integrate AIOps with
your Current Tools
AIOps integrates with existing tools and Finally, AIOps brings automation into the fold
processes, bringing together information, as well, integrating orchestration and run
insights, and capabilities that were previously books and making them directly available
locked in disconnected islands. Companies to operators as partial or full automation. IT
are using multiple different monitoring tools organizations have typically developed large
in different places and for different purposes. libraries of automated solutions over the
Each one is valuable to a specific team or years, but need to ensure that they are trig-
function, but that value is not easily available gered only by the correct conditions. AIOps
to other interested parties. Instead of engag- ensures that this is the case, minimising risk
ing laborious tool rationalisation initiatives and maximising value of existing invest-
that try to shoehorn individual needs into ments in automation.
one-size-fits-all solutions, AIOps enables
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individual tools to thrive by delivering seam-

Everything You Need to Know Abous AIOps

less shared visibility across all tools, teams,
and domains.

In the same way, AIOps improves and en-

ables ITSM by ensuring that only real, ac-
tionable incidents are created and avoiding
duplication. There is no need to discard the
experience embedded in each organisation’s
ITIL-based processes. Instead, AIOps ad-
dresses and removes many of the frustra-
tions that users have with ITSM, due to the
inherently sequential nature of ITIL.
 What are the
Benefits of AIOps?
The main benefit of adopting AIOps is that • By correlating information across multi-
it sets IT Operations up to operate with the ple data sources, AIOps eliminates silos
level of speed and agility that end users and provides a holistic vision across the
expect and require. Reliance on brittle mod- entire IT environment – compute, net-
el-based processes, increasing specialization work, and storage, physical, virtual, and
into disconnected silos, and above all, too cloud.
much repetitive manual activity, made it diffi-
• Frictionless collaboration between dif-
cult for IT Ops to keep up with the ever-in-
ferent specialists and service owners ac-
creasing pace and volume of demands on
celerates diagnosis and resolution times,
their time.
minimising disruption to end users.

• AIOps removes noise and distractions, • Advanced machine learning captures

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enabling busy IT specialists to focus on useful information in the background and
2018 AIOps Buyers Guide

what’s important and not be distracted makes it available in context to further

by irrelevant alerts. improve the handling of future situations.
What You Need to Know
About AI & Machine Learning
The AI in AIOps is not a general intelligence. Clustering and correlation is the most com-
Instead, a set of specialized algorithms are plex and crucial step, requiring multiple
narrowly focused on specific tasks. Different different approaches. A combination of his-
algorithms can pick out significant alerts torical pattern-matching and real-time iden-
from a noisy event stream, identify correla- tification helps IT Ops teams to identify both
tions between alerts from different sources, recurring and net-new issues. Raw monitor-
assemble the correct team of human spe- ing events may be enriched by reference to
cialists to diagnose and resolve a situation, an external data source, where available; this
propose probable root causes and possible enrichment helps to deliver better correla-
solutions based on past experiences, and tion, as well as service impact information.
learn from feedback in order to improve con-
tinuously over time.
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Everything You Need to Know Abous AIOps

 AIOps Key Features
Gartner’s Market Guide for AIOps Platforms • Anomaly Detection: the use of patterns
lists eleven key requirements for AIOps plat- to first determine what constitutes nor-
forms. To be truly valuable, an AIOps plat- mal system behavior, and then to identify
form should have strong capabilities in all of departures from that normal system
these areas. Single-purpose tools will only be behavior
useful for very narrowly defined use cases.
• Causal Analysis: root cause determina-
tion, using automated pattern discovery
• Stored: ingestion and indexing of histor-
to isolate genuine causal relationships
ical data
and guide operator intervention
• Streaming: capture, normalization, and
• On Premises: capabilities defined above
analysis of real-time data
can be delivered on customers’ premises,
• Logs: capture and preparation of text without requiring access to any remote
data from log files generated by software components
10
or hardware
• Cloud: capabilities defined above can
2018 AIOps Buyers Guide

• Metrics: data to which time series and be delivered in the cloud, without re-
more general mathematical operations quiring on-premises installation of any
can be immediately applied components

• Wire Data: packet data, including proto- Only solutions capable of ingesting all of
col and flow information, captured and these data types, applying these different
made available for access and analysis types of analysis, and being deployed accord-
ing to customers’ requirements, are consid-
• Document Text Data: ingestion, parsing,
ered to satisfy all of Gartner’s requirements
and syntactical and semantic indexing of
for AIOps platforms.
human readable documents

• Automated Pattern Discovery and

Detection: the ability to identify math-
ematical or structural patterns within
data streams that describe correlations,
which can then be used to identify future
incidents
 Who is Using AIOps?

Large complex enterprises reliant on

IT to conduct business
Companies with extensive IT environments, spanning multiple technology types,
are already facing issues of complexity and scale. When those are compounded by
a business model that is heavily dependent on IT, AIOps can make a huge difference
to the success of the company. Though these organizations may be in many
different industries, they share a common scale, and a rapid and accelerating rate
of change, as the need for business agility in turn creates more and more demand
for IT agility.
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2018 AIOps Buyers Guide

DevOps Teams
Companies who are adopting a DevOps model, or have already done so, can
struggle to maintain alignment between the different roles involved. Direct
integration of Dev and Ops systems into an overall AIOps model smooths away
much of the friction that can occur at that interface. By ensuring that Dev teams
have better understanding of the state of the environment, and in turn that
Ops have full visibility of when and how developers are making changes and
deployments into production, this holistic view ensures the success of the overall
project and the achievement of its goals of increased agility and responsiveness.
 Cloud Computing
A move to cloud computing can bring its own challenges, especially at scale, where
it may not be possible (or desirable) to move IT wholesale to the cloud. These
hybrid models, incorporating various forms of IT infrastructure delivery, can be hard
to operate. By delivering a holistic view across all infrastructure types, and helping
operators to understand relationships that change too quickly to be documented,
AIOps removes much of the risk from operation of a hybrid cloud platform.

Digital Transformation 13

Everything You Need to Know Abous AIOps

Digital transformation initiatives can be defined in many different ways, but one
common factor is a requirement for more speed and agility. This is a business
requirement, but IT needs to be able to operate at the speed that the business
requires if it is not to become a bottleneck, preventing achievement of the wider
goals. AIOps removes much of the friction that can otherwise prevent IT from
delivering the level of IT support that successful digital transformation projects
require.
 Where does AIOps Fit into the
Modern IT Environment?
When looking at AIOps for the first These tools are each valuable in their
time, it is not immediately obvious own right, but it can be hard to access
how it fits into existing categories the right piece of information at the
of tools. The reason is that AIOps right time, as long as they remain
does not replace existing monitoring, disconnected. Hard-coded integration
log management, service desk, or logic struggles to keep pace with
orchestration tools. Instead, it sits the rate of change of modern IT
at the intersection of these different environments. AIOps provides a much
domains, consuming and integrating more flexible approach to assembling
information across all of them and all of these different partial views
14 providing useful output to ensure a into a single comprehensive
synchronised picture is available from understanding of what is actually
2018 AIOps Buyers Guide

every tool. important for IT Ops teams to know

about.
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Everything You Need to Know Abous AIOps

Learn More About AIOps
To assist in your AIOps journey of discovery, please check out the following
resources:

• Demystifying AIOps for Busy Sysadmins

Get past the all the IT buzzwordiness, and learn how AIOps can positively impact the daily
grind of a busy sysadmin.

• 2018 AIOps Buyer’s Guide

Learn to evaluate your IT organization’s requirements, and map those needs to the AIOps
platform that suits you.

• The Gartner Market Guide for AIOps Platforms

The official word from Gartner on the definition, direction, and analysis of AIOps, as well as
recommendations for adoption.
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