News Roundup, February 12, 2021: What’s Happening in AIOps, ITOps, and IT Monitoring  

So clear was President Coolidge’s voice  KSD, the radio station in St. Louis, telephoned to the Capitol and asked: ‘What’s that grating noise?’ and the transmission experts at the Capitol promptly replied: ‘That’s the rustling of the paper as he turns the pages of his message. And speaking of using technology to more effectively communicate, here’s  the latest in AIOps,  ITOps, and IT infrastructure monitoring.

1. Should your operations model be DevOps, AIOps, NoOps, or none-of-the-above Ops? 

According to this article in DevOps.com an operations model must be tailor-made for purpose and be nimble as business needs change. As technologies evolve, an organization must change with them. However small and medium enterprises are called upon to decide how much to invest in new resources, which kinds of upgrades they need to employ, and how to find the best upgrades for their specific needs. Should a company now using a traditional operations model invest more resources into DevOps, AIOps, or NoOps?

DevOps implements the combination of IT operations and software development. Its function is to provide high quality software, by shortening the systems development life cycle. It delivers the features of the application or product infrastructure in a consistent way with fewer elements of human intervention. The overall product tends to be better through this automation.

An AIOps process gathers information and learns the ins and outs of the systems and scales to suit the needs of a platform. It can expand the scope of DevOps by its intelligence and helps organizations grow organically.

NoOps, it a bit of a misnomer. This approach to IT management puts a greater focus on development. It is a popular model with startups or enterprises with a high technology acumen.

The main factor that impacts the decision of which operations model to use involves cost. Some things to consider before going with an operations model upgrade are:

• Does this make sense for the business?
• Will the investment allow for scaling?
• Will it increase customer loyalty and trust in the brand?

Expect a bit or trial and error with different models until you find what works best for the needs of your enterprise. A modicum of failure can help give valuable insight into certain products and can show what needs to happen to keep certain problems away in the future.

2. There are five AIOps trends businesses should look out for in 2021.

According to this article in Analytics Insights, you should be watching out for certain trends in artificial intelligence that is changing the entire landscape of AIOps and how tech savvy businesses can stay ahead of the curve by paying attention to these new technologies in IT operations. The five main trends include:

• There will be a heightened enterprise adoption of AIOps.
  Utilizing AI in IT operations make it possible to sort through vast amounts of data and identify existing or potential problems can help a business grow. A recent study showed that enterprise adoption of AIOps has seen an 83% increase since 2018. This number is expected to surge as the interest in AIOps is growing.
• AIOps will transition toward multiple data types.Data scientists have been using AI algorithms to converge metric, log, and transaction data to enable organizations to anticipate problems before they occur by incorporating AIOps into their IT operations. Data scientists will use AI algorithms that can converge multiple data sets together such as metric, log, and transaction data. This will enable data scientists to understand how they correlate, and what signals can be filtered out from all that noise to troubleshoot the issues.
• AIOps will bolster threat response.Through automation, cybersecurity teams can gain valuable security peace of mind by implementing AIOps. As AIOps automates multiple IT operational processes, and detects and resolves many problems, the chasm between it and security operations teams is lessened, therefore strengthening the overall organizational IT security.
• There will be an increasing role of observability in ITOps.Observability is only obtained by having many IT components work together so an IT system may collect all data and find out not only what and where a problem is happening, but also why. Merging AIOps and observability makes it possible for a business to anticipate problems and fix them before they could negatively impact an organization.
• AIOps will become a part of the DevOps toolset.AIOps is going to be commonplace in the entire realm of DevOps. AIOps allows IT departments to thrive by not only processing data quickly, analyzing deep data, and automating routine responsibilities, but its intelligence allows DevOps teams to evolve with the needs of their organization.

3. There’s a difference between AIOps, observability, and monitoring.

According to this article in Forbes, observability and AIOps begin with a very basic premise: learn what happens within your systems and avoid extended outages. Building robust systems that are available with high uptime is the end goal for any business: solutions all work towards achieving the legendary status of zero Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

Apparently, a common problem is that there is confusion because some people do not understand what the terms mean and how they are similar and what makes them different.

• Observability consists of three telemetry components: metrics, logs, and traces, and it is about complete visibility across all systems.
• Monitoring is about understanding this visibility
• AIOps involves getting meaning from this.
• While AIOps and observability can work without the other, they complete each other for a holistic solution.

4. Monitoring and observability can help accelerate your hybrid cloud strategy.  

According to this article in CIO, The benefits of using the cloud in terms of flexibility, innovation, collaboration, and reduced costs are clear. However, the migration to the cloud can be challenging. In order to mitigate some potential issues, some organizations prefer to rely upon a hybrid model, which allows them to maintain some components on site while the others are sent to the cloud. This isn’t without its potential hurdles too as hybrid landscape has some challenges as well.

By creating a custom-made hybrid-cloud management system, organizations can map performance across multiple platforms and sites, on both private and public platforms.

Observability is key as it provides the data necessary to gain a detailed understanding of complex and highly distributed systems. Having an effective cloud-based system is essential to making sure that the entire IT suite is working at optimum efficiency. If a company doesn’t have the ability to properly monitor its complete IT environment, then the cloud is less beneficial overall.

Just getting started with AIOps and want to learn more? Read the eBook, “Your Guide to Getting Started with AIOps”>