As the pace of change in IT environments today continues to accelerate, the level of complexity in these hybrid environments is rising as well. Multi-cloud deployments and cloud-native applications can break in new and varied ways, and the volume, velocity, and variety of data they generate is ever increasing.
IT automation tools can help by eliminating the need for human intervention in the process of detecting and remediating issues. Solutions for monitoring and maintaining the health of these systems are rapidly evolving, but these tools still rely on the hunches and intuition of human troubleshooters when determining where to start looking for root causes. Yet, humans can barely wrap their minds around the complexity of hybrid environments, let alone know where to drill down on an issue. IT automation tools eliminate the bottleneck that humans have become, allowing ITOps to accelerate the process of identifying the root cause, understanding business service impact, and rapidly fixing problems.
As a leader in IT OPs management and AIOps, ScienceLogic provides IT automation tools for hybrid cloud monitoring that apply machine learning (ML) and events-driven automation to proactively detect problems, troubleshoot causes, and minimize mean time to repair (MTTR).
What IT automation tools can do
When leveraging machine learning-driven automation to monitor and manage the health business services, IT automation tools can take advantage of three leading-edge technologies.
Detecting anomalies
IT automation tools use ML techniques to learn the “normal” patterns of data streams generated by IT systems, then automatically detect deviations from that baseline. These techniques can be applied to time series data as well as log events.
Correlating events
IT automation tools also learn by watching event streams in any environment and automatically identifying groups of events that seem to be connected, such as groups with a cause-and-effect relationship. When adding event correlation to anomaly detection, IT automation tools can significantly reduce the noise generated by IT operations monitoring tools—often by a factor of hundreds or thousands—to reveal the most useful cluster of events. Sophisticated techniques can construct full timelines of significant events that identify causal relationships anytime a problem happens. These machine-generated, root cause reports replace human generated analyses that are typically built with tedious and time-consuming manual effort. Today, IT automation tools have progressed to the point where these outcomes are as accurate as those generated by skilled human troubleshooters—and much, much faster.
Natural language processing
IT automation tools for natural language processing (NLP) are ML models that are trained on existing knowledge bases. These tools provide invaluable help in connecting the dots between an issue that a team is troubleshooting and the entire universe of public knowledge in the same domain. Using APIs from OpenAI, IT automation tools can create a root cause report with a summary and possible resolutions.
IT automation tools from ScienceLogic
ScienceLogic combines these cutting-edge technologies to tame the complexity of hybrid environments and reduce MTTR with IT automation tools. The ScienceLogic AI Platform uses patented discovery techniques to find everything within your IT environment, delivering visibility across all technologies, clouds, data centers, and vendors. SL1, part of the ScienceLogic AI Platform, contextualizes data through relationship mapping and automates workflows for IT operations and IT service management.
With IT automation tools from ScienceLogic, you can:
- Accelerate troubleshooting and remediation. When an outage or incident occurs, SL1 lets you avoid the delays caused by tasks like locating best practice guidelines, looking up credentials, logging into multiple devices, and running diagnostic or remediation commands using multiple and often unfamiliar tools.
- Capture diagnostic data to enrich events and incidents. SL1 automatically enriches events and incidents with critical diagnostic information captured at the time of an event, letting your teams start troubleshooting sooner.
- Run diagnostics faster. A library of automation best practices lets you automate simple or complex, multistep processes to collect additional diagnostic data and remediate issues with a single click.
- Neutralize repetitive issues. By leveraging collected diagnostic data and remediation actions, SL1 helps forensically identify recurring problems and automate remediation actions.
Automating root cause analysis with ScienceLogic’s Skylar Automated RCA
ScienceLogic’s Skylar Automated RCA provides your ITOps teams with additional IT automation tools for automatically identifying root cause in plain language – without digging through logs.
When critical business services go down, metrics can quickly alert IT teams to the issue. But finding the root cause has traditionally required a time-consuming search through log files. ScienceLogic’s Skylar Automated RCA relieves your ITOps teams of this tedious responsibility. By automatically ingesting and running machine learning log analysis across millions or billions of messages from log files, Skylar Automated RCA enables your teams to identify and fix incidents more quickly.
With Skylar Automated RCA, your ITOps teams can:
- Get to root cause 10x faster. Skylar Automated RCA’s process enormous volumes of log messages in real time to identify root cause with machine learning capabilities. Skylar Automated RCA dramatically reduces the time it takes to understand what is broken, which in turn lets you begin troubleshooting much sooner.
- Catch unknown unknowns. The complexity of modern applications makes it difficult for ITOps teams to even know what to monitor as they watch for new and unknown problems. Skylar Automated RCA identifies unusual or novel issues and their associated root causes without needing to build manual complex rules or trawl through log data. Skylar Automated RCA can correlate unusual behavior with recent changes in performance metrics, enabling you to better understand potential business or service impact.
- Get plain language root causes summaries. Every log has its own unique syntax and vocabulary, making it difficult to quickly understand what is happening. Skylar Automated RCA distills billions of log lines down to the few most salient data points to isolate root cause. It then delivers summaries in plain language based on a natural language model with generative AI that understands your operations.
Why choose ScienceLogic?
ScienceLogic is a leader in IT operations management, providing ITOps teams with actionable insights to predict and resolve problems faster. ScienceLogic enables IT tools consolidation by combining an AIOps solution and hybrid cloud monitoring software with software for network management, automated root cause analysis, and application performance management (APM) tools.
The ScienceLogic AI Platform empowers intelligent, automated IT operations to free up time and resources by simplifying the task of managing complex, distributed IT services. Our patented discovery techniques find everything in your IT environment, delivering visibility across all technologies, data centers, and clouds.
With ScienceLogic, you can:
- See all your data: SL1 is purpose built for hybrid-cloud environments, bringing all your data together with in-depth operational support for traditional data centers, cloud-native services, and hyperscalers.
- Speed service impact and root cause analysis: Correlate events and anomalies in the context of business services to cut through the noise and respond to issues faster.
- Minimize service outages: Get real-time visibility into how your shared infrastructure affects various apps and business services. Understand dynamic service relationships, dependencies, and behaviors across your entire IT universe.
- Improve CMDB accuracy: Automatically sync your CMDB with your monitoring environment to resolve incidents faster and automate ITSM workflows.
- Automate IT workflows: Automate routine IT processes and workflows to minimize errors, increase efficiency, and free up IT resources.
- Scale quickly: Easily accommodate continuous growth or rapid spikes in the volume, variety, and velocity of data, allowing your infrastructure to grow to meet business demands.
- Continue your journey to autonomic IT: ScienceLogic supports the autonomous enterprise by helping to build a self-managing IT environment that proactively resolves issues, optimizes investments, and guides IT teams.
FAQs
What is IT automation?
IT automation is the use of technology to perform IT operations tasks and processes without human intervention. It encompasses activities such as system configuration, monitoring, maintenance, and incident management. The objective is to increase efficiency, reduce errors, and streamline IT operations.
What are IT automation tools?
IT automation tools are software solutions designed to automate repetitive IT tasks and processes. These tools help in automating workflows, managing infrastructure, and improving operational efficiency.
What are the challenges of implementing IT automation tools?
The challenges of implementing IT automation tools include integrating them with existing systems and processes, which can be complex and time-consuming. There may be a steep learning curve and resistance to change from IT staff accustomed to manual processes. Additionally, ensuring the security and reliability of automated processes requires careful planning and continuous monitoring.