How to use AIOps to modernize without compromise
While the Biden administration aggressively pushes federal agencies to modernize their IT infrastructures, ITOps managers are left wondering how to do so without making network management more complex than it already is.
Modernization necessitates the addition of more tools, which can easily lead to tool sprawl and increase technical debt. Managers are already using multitudes of vendor-specific tools to monitor different devices and applications. The last thing they want is to add more.
But modernization doesn’t have to mean added work or complexity. By using artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to enhance operations—a process known as AIOps—federal IT teams can relinquish much of their manual network management responsibilities. They can accelerate the delivery of value-added applications and services without having to worry about constantly keeping the lights on.
Controlling complexity through consolidation
The average enterprise uses about 200 applications, and federal agencies are no exception. Indeed, federal IT estates are growing in complexity, with new services replacing or being added to costly legacy systems. For many administrators, managing these estates has become exasperating, as they attempt to walk the line between keeping up with multiple management tools, navigating storms of alerts, making sure that everything is running smoothly and securely, and moving their IT organizations forward.
AIOps solves each of these challenges by eliminating manual tasks and replacing them with a single solution for monitoring and remediation. AIOps consolidates network monitoring into a single platform, thereby significantly reducing tool sprawl. It gives administrators a single UI through which they can view their entire infrastructure, thereby negating the need to keep up with many different point solutions.
The key is using a platform that contextualizes data – including logs and other telemetry – and applies AI and machine learning to that information so that insights, like root cause analysis, as well as remediation actions can be easily automated. For example, ScienceLogic’s AIOps platform, SL1, collects data from across hybrid IT environments and places it into a data lake. This allows the platform to be “data aware,” with the ability to automatically apply context to this data and make it actionable. ITOps teams can then apply automatons to actions, including network monitoring and issue resolution.
This reduces the need for managers to be continuously vigilant and keep up with numerous solutions while automating manually intensive “Level 1” issues and significantly accelerating mean time to resolution (MTTR).
“Human-friendly” AIOps
This doesn’t mean that humans are completely taken out of the loop. It simply means that their jobs become infinitely easier and more valuable. We like to call this “human-friendly AIOps”—a technology that’s easy for people to interact with and learn from while making them more productive.
For example, AIOps combines extensible monitoring with generative AI-assisted automation to automatically identify and remediate potential bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, and other threats to network efficiency. Its self-healing abilities allow it to automatically identify and remediate issues before they become real problems without the need for manual intervention. Administrators, specifically Level 1 engineers, gain more time to gain new knowledge that will help solve mission-critical challenges, deliver innovative citizen services, and more.
There might be some issues that an administrator will need to respond to or prefer to address rather than let the system manage them. In these cases, AIOps provides IT teams with ML and AI-powered intelligence and recommended actions they can choose to use to target an anomaly with an action plan. No need to waste time trying to hunt down the problem and figure out a way to fix it. If the recommendation conflicts with their understanding and experience, they have the option to disregard it. In this way, ITOps teams can move towards a state of autonomic IT at their own pace.
Modernize without compromise
A modern AIOps platform allows federal ITOps managers to accomplish a number of things. It helps them manage their networks more efficiently and intelligently, which saves them time and ensures better network efficiency and uptime. It also cuts down on the number of tools required to do so, keeping agencies from adding to tool sprawl. And it allows them to become more efficient, which lets them devote more time to focus on supporting business critical initiatives.
Perhaps just as important, it allows teams to do each of these things without sacrificing their modernization goals. They don’t have to choose between efficiency and productivity or moving their agencies forward. They can do both without having to worry about making their jobs and their networks more complex. They can simplify their IT operations while expanding their modernization initiatives.
For more information on how ScienceLogic’s SL1 AIOps platform can help accelerate federal modernization efforts without increasing technical debt, visit https://sciencelogic.com/product/resources/what-is-aiops.
