Accelerating Root Cause Analysis with Observability Technology

When your applications, services, and IT infrastructure go down, identifying root cause fast is a business-critical priority. However, the complexity of your modern IT environment makes this task incredibly challenging for your IT teams. With highly distributed architecture, interconnected microservices, and exploding volumes of data, your IT staff may need to sort through thousands of log streams to troubleshoot an issue—if they even know where to look or what to look for.

To solve this challenge, many IT teams are turning to observability technology. Some observability solutions like ScienceLogic’s Skylar Automated Root Cause Analysis (RCA) technology, use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to quickly analyze millions or billions of messages from log files across your entire IT estate in real time. With the right observability platform, your teams can diagnose issues, detect outliers, correlate rare root cause indicators and symptoms, and identify and remediate problems with exceptional speed.

ScienceLogic Skylar Automated RCA is an AI observability solution that does the heavy lifting of analyzing logs to find and fix problems fast. Skylar Automated RCA eliminates much of the manual work required to diagnose root cause from logs, identifies unknowns before they cause incidents, and delivers actionable insights in plain language to simplify and streamline troubleshooting.

How observability surpasses monitoring solutions

For years, IT infrastructure monitoring solutions have been the go-to solution for understanding the health of IT operations and alerting teams to problems and outages. However, the extraordinary complexity and enormous volumes of data generated by today’s hybrid IT environments means monitoring solutions are less effective at helping teams maintain performance and availability of business services.

Monitoring tools primarily focus on singular cloud stacks or a fixed set of devices and provide visibility into what’s working and what’s not. While these capabilities can be helpful, they can’t tell IT teams exactly what the problem is or where to look for it.

Observability goes beyond traditional monitoring, using AI/ML to help teams understand why something isn’t working and how to fix it. Observability tools analyze log events, detect anomalies, and deliver precise root cause analysis—in a fraction of the time it would take a team of IT pros to perform the same tasks.

Automate observability with Skylar Automated RCA

Skylar Automated RCA is a machine-driven, hybrid cloud observability platform that can help teams automatically identify root cause in plain language, without manually digging through logs. By automatically ingesting and running ML log analysis on massive amounts of log data in real-time, Skylar Automated RCA can help your teams identify and fix incidents faster.

With Skylar Automated RCA, your IT teams can:

• Use an AI/ML solution that really works. ScienceLogic has conducted large-scale, quantitative, third-party studies of the effectiveness of Skylar Automated RCA in real-world scenarios across multiple stacks. A multi-month study of 192 Cisco Systems customers, for example, found that Skylar Automated RCA created reports at the right time with the right root-cause indicators over 95% of the time.
• Troubleshoot problems faster with rich integrations.  Skylar Automated RCA integrates easily with the most common AIOps and observability platforms, directly sharing root cause insights to increase the effectiveness of APM, observability, notification, and collaboration tools including Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, Elastic/Kibana, Grafana, ScienceLogic, and AppDynamics. With Skylar Automated RCA, you can eliminate duplicate efforts and enhance efficiency by synchronizing common incident and notification tools for managing alerts and messages.
• Deploy observability technology wherever you need it.  Skylar Automated RCA can monitor technology in the cloud, on-premises, or in modern cloud-native Kubernetes environments. Skylar Automated RCA also supports ingest via Fluentd, Logstash, Cloudwatch, Syslog, API, and CLI.

Benefits of managing observability with Skylar Automated RCA

As a proven root cause as a service (RCaaS) tool, Skylar Automated RCA correctly infers types and parameters of generic and unstructured logs, correlating anomalies across log streams to formulate root cause reports. These capabilities enable IT teams to more easily remediate issues and maintain system health. With Skylar Automated RCA, IT teams can:

• Identify and analyze issues faster: By eliminating most of the manual work involved in diagnosing root cause from logs, Skylar Automated RCA’s automated IT root cause analysis empowers your teams to diagnose issues up to 10x faster.  Skylar Automated RCA sorts through enormous volumes of log messages in real time, quickly spots where to start troubleshooting and repair efforts, and identifies the root cause with machine learning tools.
• Stay ahead of the unknowns: When teams rely on manual processes to monitor complex modern applications and IT architecture, knowing what could break at any given time is incredibly challenging.  Skylar Automated RCA spots unusual or novel issues and associated root causes without requiring teams to manually build complex rules or trawl through log data. By correlating unusual behavior with recent changes and performance metrics, Skylar Automated RCA delivers insight into the potential impact of problems on business services.
• Simplify log data: Because no two logs are alike, even experienced developers have difficulty deciphering log data. Skylar Automated RCA distills billions of log lines down to the most salient entries and delivers root cause summaries in plain language based on a natural language model with generative AI that understands your operations.

Why ScienceLogic?

Offering AIOps, observability, and network automation solutions, ScienceLogic empowers automated IT operations to free up IT talent, accelerate innovation and transformation, and drive better business outcomes. The ScienceLogic AI Platform monitors your organization’s digital footprint wherever it resides, delivering greater visibility and availability of business services. Trusted by thousands of organizations across the globe, ScienceLogic’s technology meets the rigorous security requirements of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and has been proven for scale by the world’s largest service providers.

Named one of the top three vendors in The Forrester Wave™: Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) Q4 2022 report, ScienceLogic offers a powerful combination of data, analytics, and automation that supports a variety of use cases. Brands worldwide choose ScienceLogic to reduce operational expense, improve customer satisfaction, and increase staff productivity.