The Journey to Autonomic IT: How AI Advisors, not AI Assistants, Can Get You There

Today’s IT teams face unprecedented challenges as they manage increasingly complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments and vast amounts of data. The pressure to maintain uptime, optimize performance, and ensure security – all while balancing limited resources – has become a daunting task for even the most seasoned professionals.

So how can these organizations stay ahead of the curve? They must turn to AI advisors, where tools and platforms operate with a degree of autonomy and can act on their own to achieve specific goals.

Unlike traditional AI models that typically just respond to human prompts, AI Advisors can make decisions, plan actions, and even learn from past experiences to achieve the objectives set by humans.

Enter Skylar Advisor.

Skylar Advisor is part of our advanced Skylar AI suite and the culmination of ScienceLogic’s decades-long product investment in AIOps, bringing together advanced AI, machine learning, and automation capabilities into a unified platform that transforms how organizations monitor, manage, and optimize their IT infrastructure.

Skylar Advisor is an essential facilitator of AIOps and the journey to Autonomic IT – IT systems that are self-managing, self-optimizing, and self-healing.

What is Skylar Advisor?

Skylar Advisor transcends the limitations of today’s AI assistants by delivering proactive and curated guidance to optimize IT operations. It’s a comprehensive observability platform, fueled by AI, that can anticipate events and deliver recommended actions to remediate them, even before being prompted by a human worker.

By collecting and analyzing vast amounts of IT operational data, Skylar Advisor empowers IT teams with tailored, persona-based guidance and actionable, plain-language recommendations. It helps businesses prevent issues, optimize system performance, enhance security measures, and drive innovation without constant human care and feeding.

Skylar Advisor can predict outcomes and identify root causes while adapting recommendations based on evolving patterns and specific business needs. This ensures the advice remains relevant and timely, so businesses stay ahead of potential issues.

Whether suggesting adjustments in resource allocation during peak loads or recommending upgrades based on performance trends, Skylar Advisor helps users at all skill levels swiftly resolve complex IT challenges and organizations make informed decisions that align with their strategic goals.

How Skylar AI Stands Apart from AI Assistants

AI assistants, on the other hand, have been around for over a decade and provide ITOps teams with proactive anomaly and issue detection and alerting. However, AI assistants have several limitations when compared to AI advisors like Skylar Advisor.

• AI assistants have limited contextual understanding: While AI assistants can analyze data patterns, they lack deep context about novel or unknown scenarios that require human skill and experience. They are also unable to connect what the data is telling them to business-level service impacts.

How Skylar Advisor is superior: Skylar overcomes these limitations by leveraging relationship mapping and telemetry to assess real-time operational data, such as performance metrics, anomalies, and error rates, to highlight issues within unique environments. These agentic AI capabilities help IT teams get immediate context around an issue, such as the probable cause, affected business systems, and urgency level – as well as contextualized recommendations.

• Dependence on data quality: AI assistants are only as good as the data they process. Poor-quality, inconsistent, or incomplete data – especially data from siloed tools – can lead to inaccurate predictions, incorrect alerts, or ineffective recommendations, which may cause inefficiencies or even harm operations.

How Skylar Advisor is superior: Skylar is powered by the ScienceLogic AI Platform, which seamlessly fuses data from across hybrid IT operations, breaking down data silos and delivering a single source of truth into the entire IT environment. With a single, coherent system of operational data, Skylar applies machine-driven analysis for highly accurate insights, predictions, and recommendations.

• Difficulty with complex root cause analysis: In highly interconnected complex IT estate identifying root cause can be complex. AI assistants may struggle to diagnose multi-layered issues without assistance from human engineers to understand the entire environment.

How Skylar Advisor is superior: Skylar automatically ingests data from millions of logs across applications, eliminating manual work and diagnosing root cause 10x faster – even unknown unknowns, before they cause incidents. Plus, GenAI summaries and recommendations dramatically reduce the time to understand what is actually broken.

• Technical jargon and overwhelming information: Many AI assistants use specialized terminology and technical language that can be confusing for users who lack a deep IT or data analytics background. AI assistants also generate a lot of data and insights, which can overwhelm users. Users may struggle to identify the most critical information without clear summarization or prioritization.

How Skylar Advisor is superior: Unlike AI assistants, Skylar prioritizes human friendliness. An easy-to-navigate interface with customizable dashboards displays metrics most relevant to a user’s role, and LLM-fueled plain-language insights, recommendations, and step-by-step guidance allow IT professionals to focus on strategic decision-making rather than get bogged down by data analysis.

• Model drift: AI assistants are built on specific datasets and may become less effective as systems change (model drift) or new systems are introduced. That’s because they become “overfitted” to historical patterns, which limits their ability to adapt to new conditions or sudden changes in the IT landscape.

How Skylar Advisor is superior: Thanks to ScienceLogic’s extensive library of pre-built integrations, data flows seamlessly across the IT environment, giving Skylar visibility across all technologies, apps, and services for always-on, continuous infrastructure monitoring without the need for manual selection of each metric or device.

• Human trust: AI assistants require trust from humans. If recommendations or actions prove unreliable or disruptive due to data quality, challenges with root cause analysis, model drift, or a lack of human-friendly insights, human operators will be reluctant to rely on the AI or allow it to take autonomous actions.

How Skylar Advisor is superior: Skylar is built on a foundation of trust. As explained above, it uses advanced machine learning algorithms to analyze data and provide accurate and reliable insights. The AI also continually learns from new data and user interactions, adapting to changing environments and improving performance over time.

Skylar is also transparent. It explains its decision-making processes so users can understand how it reaches conclusions or recommendations. Users can also set parameters, customize alerts, and define how they want Skylar to assist them, fostering a sense of control and collaboration between human users and AI.

While AI assistants succeed in streamlining IT workflows, support the shift to prevention with proactive monitoring and drive efficiency, enterprises require a true advisor to realize Autonomic IT. With the Skylar AI suite, ScienceLogic facilitates this shift from AI assistants to AI advisors.

Unleash the Power of Agentic AI with ScienceLogic’s Skylar AI

Managing IT infrastructure can be overwhelming, but ScienceLogic’s Skylar AI is here to help. With advanced AI capabilities, Skylar AI empowers IT teams to proactively manage their environments, reduce downtime, optimize performance, and accelerate their journey to Autonomic IT. It leverages agentic AI’s full potential by finding the right balance between autonomy and human-in-the loop oversight, maintaining trust while augmenting the capabilities of IT teams.

Ready to take your IT operations to the next level? Discover how Skylar AI can transform your IT management strategy by visiting ScienceLogic Skylar AI.