eBook

Supercharge
Operations
Management
with AIOps
 “Complex, distributed applications that employ
containers, on-prem and cloud resources,
orchestration tools, and microservices are
more challenging to manage. They generate
IT operations teams face large volumes of operations data, and when

a growing challenge.
performance problems occur, they issue a
cascading series of events, making it difficult for
operations professionals to pinpoint the cause.”*
As IT environments grow in scale and complexity, it’s not
enough for organizations to monitor infrastructure and *451 Research, ‘Strong adoption of
AI & ML monitoring tools is driven
applications for performance and availability. They must by tech leaders’, October 2020

also manage and optimize the business service as a whole to

provide the agility, speed, and scalability required by DevOps
initiatives, new technologies, lift-and-shift cloud migrations,
and cloud-native applications.

To fully leverage AIOps, look

beyond monitoring for a holistic
management solution.

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Speed, data volume, and complexity:
A challenging combination
Simply put, IT organizations are facing a firehose of data — far too much to analyze quickly and then respond in time.
Trouble signals are being drowned out by too much noise and typically lack the context necessary to determine the root
cause. As a result, organizations experience service degradation, availability issues, prolonged mean-time-to-repair (MTTR),
and enhanced risk for missing service level agreements.

To cope with increased data volumes and IT environment complexity, operations teams often acquire IT monitoring tools
in a tactical and fragmented way, with less than satisfactory results:

MULTIPLE SINGLE-POINT TOOLS:

Many organizations load up on monitoring tools, which results in higher costs and a lack
of integration that complicates rather than improves end-to-end visibility.

MONITORING-ONLY STRATEGY:
Organizations that have modernized their monitoring tools can still be slow to respond to issues because they lack
early visibility into anomalies and root causes, and are overwhelmed by noise created by multiple uncorrelated events.

MANUAL ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS:

Monitoring alone does little to assist in the slow, methodical task of uncovering and resolving the
root cause of performance issues, which delays resolution, wastes skilled labor, and increases MTTR.

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“74% of incidents are detected by
customers before IT is aware of them.”*

“Average MTTR per incident is 3 hours and 7

minutes. 72% of that time is spent identifying
the root cause of the problem.”*

“Cloud-native technologies often require

users to update their monitoring tools,
and the tools that serve cloud native
environments often use AI/ML.”**

*Digital Enterprise Journal, September 2019

**451 Research, ‘Strong adoption of AI & ML monitoring tools is

driven by tech leaders’, October 2020
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How AIOps supercharges operations management
End-to-end monitoring across complex, hybrid environments with containerized microservices is necessary but is not up to the task
without AIOps. IT Operations teams must adopt an integrated monitoring, event management, and remediation strategy driven by
intelligence, machine learning (ML) and AI-powered data analytics across their entire IT environment.

In addition, they must build AIOps into digital and cloud transformation processes as they aim to maintain the highest visibility,
performance, and availability levels possible. To achieve this goal, an effective AIOps strategy must solve for these challenges:

• UNDETECTED ANOMALIES:
Setting manual thresholds to detect anomalous activity can lead to false
alarms or overlooked complex multivariate anomalies.

• EVENT NOISE: “By 2022, DevOps

As IT environments grow in size and complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult to see
through the symptoms of a problem to accurately identify the source. teams that leverage
AIOps platforms to deploy,
• CONTEXT & CORRELATION:
Multiple events are often related to a single root cause, requiring IT staff to spend time monitor and support
sifting through these events to drill down to the root cause, a labor-intensive process. applications will increase
• INTEROPERABILITY: delivery cadence by 20%.”*
There are many monitoring tools out there, so you need open integrations and a *Gartner, ‘Augment Decision Making in DevOps
unified platform that can leverage data from across your environments to obtain Using AI Techniques,’ June 2019
intelligent operations management recommendations.

Operations teams must deploy machine learning and analytics as part of

an AIOps strategy to manage the increasing volume, variety, and velocity of
data across an increasingly hybrid, complex, and fast-moving IT landscape.
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 Look for:
The building
blocks of AIOps
A single monitoring solution that acts as a
‘manager of managers,’ which consolidates third-
party monitoring and event data, to provide a
How can you get from monitoring to the full-fledged promise unified view of complex IT infrastructure
of AI-driven operations management and performance
optimization? Your solution should provide these capabilities: Elastic, containerized microservices
• Service-centric monitoring architecture that enables enterprise scalability,
performance, and availability for any on-prem,
• ML-driven anomaly detection
hybrid, or cloud-based environment
• Advanced log analytics

• Policy-based, automated event management

• AI-driven, service-centric probable cause analysis SaaS deployment, which enables rapid
onboarding and the ability to manage complex,
• Open integrations with third-party solutions for maximum visibility and context
dynamic workloads
• Dynamic service models

• Multiple data sources

Leading-edge AIOps and machine learning
• Reporting and easy-to-use, customizable dashboards
techniques, which trigger events and notifications
before thresholds are breached

IT Operations teams must adopt

a comprehensive operations Advanced analytics capabilities that have
the ability to manage and process the ever-
management strategy driven by increasing volume, variety, and velocity of data
from multiple sources
intelligence, ML, and advanced analytics
across their entire IT environment.
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ML-driven anomaly detection
Your solution should be smart enough to learn the vital signs of a healthy
system and detect anomalies wherever they occur to…

Predict and proactively uncover issues before

they cause service degradation or interruption

Recognize univariate and complex multivariate

anomalies across configuration items

The smarter your anomaly detection

becomes, the more proactive your team
can be to capture performance issues
before they disrupt services.

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Policy-based automated event management
Manual rules-based event management is time-consuming and prone to oversights and errors. Your AIOps solution
should provide automated event management based on analytics and the data governance policies you’ve set. This offers
your team these benefits:

CONTEXT EVENT CORRELATION AUTOMATION

Rather than receiving indecipherable error
AND NOISE REDUCTION Policy-based event management can generate
messages and URLs, the event can specify Your solution should be able to correlate a plain-language trouble ticket to a help solve
issues and locations in plain language. among multiple events to generate a higher- a problem affecting a complex, multi-step
level event, minimizing noise. business process.

Connect your automated event management solution with

probable cause analysis to your service desk to provide context
for help desk personnel to increase efficiency and reduce MTTR.
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AI-driven, service-centric
probable cause analysis
The holy grail of AIOps is to bring AI to bear on very large numbers of events,
analyze them, and determine the most likely root cause(s) of a problem.

Here’s how AI-driven analytics and automation saves time and resources:

1. The system reviews data collected across all sources and sees through event noise

2. It analyzes events that have come in, including factors such as timing, location,
anomalies, services affected, and more.

3. It learns how the infrastructure is configured and the relationships between

servers, applications, and data.

4. It provides the IT team a recommendation for the most likely probable cause.

5. In seconds, the IT team can focus its attention on the likeliest solution.

Probable cause analysis provides proactive,

automated determination of root cause
across business services to cut through the
noise and reduce MTTR.
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The bad old days
While users are experiencing downtime
or performance issues, you’re…

• Pulling the team away from its other work

• Investigating the large numbers of events showing

up on your dashboard

• Looking into the metrics generating those events

• Referencing a topology view to try to

understand dependencies

• Scratching your head

• Moving onto the next event until you ultimately

find the one that really matters

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 4 types of data for analytics
Open integration
The AIOps model ingests and consolidates data
Open integration is a key capability of AIOps, allowing it to from all these sources, no matter what monitoring
pull data from multiple solutions, including third-party tools, tool was used to detect them.
for analysis and decision-making.

• Ingest metric events and typology from a wide range of sources via
REST API out of the box.
METRICS
• Consolidate data and create context-aware analysis.

• Provide a software development kit to support intelligent, open

integrations from any third-party source.
EVENTS

Find a “manager of managers”

LOGS
capable of consolidating and analyzing
monitoring data no matter the source.
TOPOLOGIES

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Dynamic service modeling
Maintaining service models can be a time-consuming and resource-
intensive process, especially given the rate at which IT changes. Dynamic
service modeling helps you avoid physically maintaining a service model
Pull discovery data and adding metrics, events, logs, and topology.

Ingest information from aross your environment.

Get AI-driven discovery for all CIs and

the relationships between them.

Feed information to an operations management

platform for use with probable cause analysis and
other capabilities.

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The BMC Helix Operations Management advantage
BMC Helix Operations Management uses predictive capabilities to improve the performance and
availability of IT services across multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments proactively.

• AUTOMATED EVENT NOISE REDUCTION:

Use ML and analytics to identify operational issues quickly by reducing
event noise up to 90%.

• INTELLIGENT ANOMALY DETECTION:

Use multivariate or univariate anomaly detection to trigger events
and notifications based on metrics behaving abnormally.
Leverage dynamic service
• AUTOMATED EVENT MANAGEMENT: models and apply AIOps
Easily create and deploy customized policies to manage and control
events and service impacts and perform event analytics. to enhance anomaly
• SERVICE-CENTRIC PROBABLE CAUSE ANALYSIS: detection and probable-
Reduce MTTR by viewing the most likely sources of a
problem and obtain a full, actionable analysis.
cause analysis and
determine service impacts.
• OPEN INTEGRATIONS:
Use out-of-the-box adapters and REST APIs for policy-driven data
collection, and ingestion of topologies from third-party solutions.

• BMC HELIX PLATFORM:

Unified, open platform for cross-domain visibility, operability,
and AI-driven automated actions and workflows.

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The BMC Helix Platform connects
operations and service teams and unifies
BMC Helix Operations Management with:

BMC Helix Discovery: to generate detailed CI datasets

and topologies across complex IT environments.

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization: to align IT

resources with business service demands.

BMC Helix Cloud Cost: to optimize cloud resource

costs, eliminating wasted spend and budget over-runs.

BMC Helix ITSM: to deliver dramatic

improvements in service desk efficiency using
intelligence and predictive capabilities.

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Leading analysts agree: Find out why BMC ranks so highly

BMC is a leader To learn more, download the full analyst reports

 Gartner Magic Quadrant

The judgements are in
BMC earns high ranking among Infrastructure and Operations for ITSM Tools, October 2020
(I&O) solution providers on a consistent basis and across
 EMA Radar Reports:
multiple dimensions.
AIOps, Q3 2020
Gartner Magic Quadrant, October, 2020
In Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IT Service Management Tools,
BMC was categorized as a leader, with the highest ranking in
completeness of vision among the 11 ranked providers thanks
to its broad IT operations management portfolio, flexible
deployment options, and advanced I&O use case maturity.

EMA Radar Report: AIOps, Q3 2020

Enterprise Management Assoiates (EMA) scored BMC
at the top of the charts for Busines Impact and Business
Alignment use-case categories in EMA’s recent AIOps Radar
report. According to the report, BMC “offers a rich variety of
automation options that are well evolved, well integrated, and
central to its vision of the Autonomous Digital Enterprise.”

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Compare BMC Helix
Operations Management
BMC understands your
journey towards the
BMC HELIX OPERATIONS
CAPABILITY MANAGEMENT

AIOps and machine learning 

Anomaly detection (Univariate, Multivariate) 

adoption of AIOps
Behavioral learning  Through BMC Helix Operations Management
Monitoring and event management
and complementary products across the BMC

portfolio, we can help you achieve the essential
External event ingestion 
benefits of IT operations management.
Event noise reduction 

Proactive alerts and notifications

• RAPID DEPLOYMENT:

Containerized, microservices architecture with SaaS-
Agent-based/agent-less collection  based deployment enables fast time to value for any
complex IT infrastructure
Event analytics including clustering 
• REDUCED MTTR:
Elastic scalibility  Leading-edge AIOps and machine learning technologies
proactively detect and analyze events
Containerized architecture 

External data ingestion  • INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY:

Deep insights into complex infrastructures enable Cloud and
Multi-tenancy  Operations teams to quickly pinpoint and prevent issues

Probable cause analysis 

• ENHANCED BUSINESS CONTINUITY:
Flexible scalability for managing complex, dynamic workloads

Continue your exploration

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Contact us for a detailed demonstration of what BMC Helix
Operations Management can do for you.
About BMC
BMC delivers software, services, and expertise to help more than 10,000 customers, including 92% of the Forbes Global 100, meet escalating digital demands and
maximize IT innovation. From mainframe to mobile multi-cloud and beyond, our solutions empower enterprises of every size and industry to run and reinvent their
business with efficiency, security, and momentum for the future.

Run and Reinvent www.bmc.com

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