How AIOps helps federal agencies combat IT technical debt?
When it comes to federal IT modernization, technical debt presents a catch-22. CIOs, IT administrators, and developers know they must modernize their legacy infrastructures to whittle down their technical debt. However, modernization necessitates the need to purchase new solutions, which can end up adding to the technical debt load and create an even more complex IT landscape.
Organizations often attempt to solve this problem by adding more specialized tools to monitor and manage their legacy applications. Unfortunately, many of these tools end up being vendor-specific or specific to one layer of the technology stack and fail to provide visibility into the entire IT infrastructure, resulting in blind spots that could compromise the efficacy and security of the entire network. This counterproductive approach also increases costs and complexity, only adding to the technical debt burden.
Instead of adding to this burden, agencies must consolidate the tools they currently have and automate network operations as much as possible. This can be achieved through artificial intelligence for IT operations: AIOps.
AIOps enables agencies to unlock actionable insights into all layers of the technology stack. It’s a great option for federal organizations seeking to better control their IT environment—and better manage their technical debt.
How does AIOps help with technical debt?
Federal IT networks are inundated with data and applications, creating an enormously complex environment that can be a monitoring nightmare. The management challenge is compounded by agencies combining and sharing applications, which is often necessary for national security and citizen services, but can create additional problems for IT professionals who are already trying to manage the numerous resources they already have.
AIOps helps IT administrators alleviate technical debt by consolidating multiple monitoring tools into a single, intelligent solution. Administrators gain a pane-of-glass view into the performance of all their applications. With fewer resources to worry about, they can spend less time jumping between disparate monitoring tools and more time reducing their existing technical debt without adding to it.
Our AIOps platform, ScienceLogic SL1, collects data from physical and virtual infrastructures and places the information into a data lake. Through a single UI, administrators can easily see everything that’s happening in their environment without needing to switch between different tools. Precious time is no longer spent hunting down and troubleshooting issues or trying to keep up with numerous monitoring solutions, freeing up administrators to contain tool sprawl.
In fact, a recent Total Economic Impact Study by Forrester reveals that AIOps can drive tool consolidation by 60%.
How does AIOps help teams deliver value to their agencies?
In addition to visibility and consolidation, SL1 uses rich contextualized intelligence about the tech stack and advanced workflow automations so ITOps teams can act faster to address service issues – before they impact the mission – thus advancing their AIOps journey.
We call this being “data aware.” It’s the opposite of being “data agnostic,” where ITOps teams must navigate and analyze disjointed and possibly incomplete data, which then needs to be cleansed and organized in order to be useful. A system that is data aware is mindful of its own internal state and can automatically make adjustments as necessary with minimal human intervention – an important step towards autonomic IT.
SL1 is a data aware platform. It applies context to data from the data lake and delivers meaningful and actionable insights. This allows ITOps teams to directly apply automatons based on pre-defined rules so they can automate their operations, including application monitoring, and speed mean time to resolution (MTTR) by 10x.
For example, teams can set protocols to only be alerted for particularly egregious anomalies, significantly reducing “alert storms.” This gives them more time to perform value-added work for their agencies.
While much of this time will undoubtedly go toward innovating new business services, some of it will inevitably be allocated to modernizing legacy technologies. With SL1 ITOps teams won’t have to add to their tech stacks to do either. AIOps gives administrators a powerful weapon in the unending fight against technical debt.
For more information on how AIOps can deliver the observability and automation necessary to accelerate mission-critical operations at the federal, state and local levels, visit https://sciencelogic.com/government-public-sector-it-solutions.
