2023 Trends in AIOps, Observability, and ITOps

If you’re looking at the calendar and have concerns that your plans are not yet finalized, fear not. If your future involves AIOps, observability, and digital transformation, ScienceLogic has taken the initiative. We’ve done the hard work to find the data, expert opinions, forecasts, and insights to help you step boldly into 2023 with a plan that matters.

AIOps

According to ESC research as reported by TechTarget, nearly 30% of organizations plan to make significant investments in AIOps over the next 12 to 18 months, and more than 90% said they expect to spend as much or more on AI and machine learning in 2023 as they had in 2022. Adding more depth, nearly one third of those organizations indicated that new monitoring and observability tool investments would complement their investments in AIOps in that same period.

New and increased investments? But isn’t there talk of a recession and economic uncertainty? Yes, but that puts a premium on smart investments in technology. In fact, over at APMDigest one expert likened the headwinds of 2023 to the pandemic disruption of 2020 which resulted in a “7x increase in the pace of digital transformation.” Those were investments in competitive advantage and efficiency and are expected to be replicated next year for transformative technologies.

That is why we’ll likely see a similar acceleration in the adoption of AIOps even if a recession does materialize.  Performance gains in areas like reliability, along with boosting the productivity and efficiency of IT ops staff were cited as reasons why AIOps makes sense, along with other factors like:

• Faster MTTR & MTTD through data-driven automations;
• Continued need to support remote operations; and,
• Enabling predictive remediation and “self-healing” systems.

More AIOps data and trends for 2023 include:

• Only 48% of organizations today are making decisions based on quantitative analysis (Forrester)
• There will be 30% growth in the number of organizations with a formal data governance team (Forrester)
• The top 5 companies in each industry will use tech to deliver insights and as a platform for innovating during a global crisis (IDC)
• By 2024, 30% of enterprises will extend network attentiveness across IT teams, including AIOps. (IDC)
• 35% of organizations are prioritizing investments in AIOps to improve data center performance (ESG)

The plans for increased investments and greater leveraging of its capabilities makes sense when you realize that the secret is out on AIOps; the market doesn’t have to be convinced. Instead, as The Next Web believes, enterprises know that “AIOps helps IT staff do things that were impossible with their previous tools. The first step to implementing AIOps is to collect quality information about your IT infrastructure and operations. This is important not only to provide you with a better image of your IT infrastructure, but also to train and guide AI systems to optimize and monitor them. This first stage of AIOps is called ‘observability.’”

And that makes for a nice segue into our next section.

Observability

Gartner ranks “Applied Observability” number two on its list of top ten strategic trends in IT for 2023. Observability, according to Gartner, is the key to making data-driven decisions, and to making the shift from reactive to proactive IT operations. On that topic, a recent article by VentureBeat reported that only 27% of organizations surveyed said they’d achieved full-stack observability of their enterprise, and that for 34% of those there was a corresponding decrease in network and service outages.

Meanwhile, the same article said that 54% of organizations without full-stack observability reported an above average number of outages. Not surprisingly, 52% of respondents said they planned to increase their budgets to improve observability in 2023. Seeing and understanding what is happening in your IT estate in real-time clearly makes a difference, and that is driving a sharp increase in observability spending.

CDInsights reports that the observability market, which was valued at $278M last year, will begin to expand rapidly this year, reaching $2B by 2026. And there’s plenty of room to expand, with 90% of organizations reporting observability as holding strategic value, but only half actually implementing observability initiatives to date.

According to Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), 2023 investments in observability are expected to cut average downtime costs nearly 90% from $23.9M for organizations beginning their journeys, to only $2.5M for those with mature programs. That’s serious ROI! And the advantages don’t stop there. According to IDC, organizations they surveyed identified other strategic benefits to observability including:

• Improving IT staff productivity and collaboration;
• Facilitate faster and more precise IT and business decision making;
• Strengthen an organization’s cybersecurity posture and practices;
• Accelerate digital innovation; and,
• Improve customer and employee digital experiences.

All that AIOps and Observability data adds up to one compelling reason to move forward with plans to effect Digital Transformation (you do have such plans, don’t you?). Let’s look at some of the numbers that describe how those initiatives might unfold in 2023.

ITOps Digital Transformation

According to ZDNet, there are seven trends driving digital transformation, including:

• Investment in automation
• Composability to drive innovation and agility
• Accommodation of non-technical users through
  • Low-code and no-code tools, and
  • Automation
• Total experience (TX) strategies
• Automated analytics
• Cybersecurity, and
• Sustainability.

These trends aim to improve IT performance, improve the user experience and productivity, breed loyalty among customers, and drive innovation for the organization. Lofty goals, yes, but research from IDC says process automation has reduced errors for 79% of organizations that have adopted it, and Gartner says organizations adopting hyper automation this year will see operational costs lowered by 30%. Overall Deloitte reports 53% of organizations are already in the process of adopting automation, while Futurum Research found that 61% of organizations struggling with staffing issues are turning to automation, and that in 2023 94% of those organizations will leverage those efficiencies to shift employees to higher value tasks.

The potential for process improvements and innovations are so broad that, according to CIO Dive, while about 60% of enterprises intend to invest heavily in digital transformation, the biggest challenge for many is in choosing an area of focus. With IT spending overall expected to reach $4.6 trillion in 2023, there’s a lot of change in store for enterprises.

And to increase your likelihood of pinning down real results and ROI, the words of Mr. Wonderful come echoing back. “You better have a plan.” So, talk to ScienceLogic. We can help you with that plan, and with the right platform on which to build it.

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