ScienceLogic’s CEO Discusses AIOps Evolution with Techstrong TV

ScienceLogic’s CEO Discusses AIOps Evolution with Techstrong TV 

In early 2024, ScienceLogic published a new book chronicling the company’s pioneering AIOps Journey. Authored by CEO Dave Link, the book, “Innovation: Journey and Outcomes for the AIOps Revolution,” delves into the narrative of how the ScienceLogic’s SL1 platform has grown to empower organizations to navigate the intricate challenges of managing complex, distributed IT services with unparalleled speed, scale, and real-time precision. 

To explain the thought process behind the book, Dave recently joined Techstrong TV’s Michael Vizard for a one-on-one interview.  

Catch Dave’s interview below, and read on for a quick Q&A-style overview of this lively discussion exploring the transformative impact of AI and AIOps on how organizations maneuver and optimize their IT estates. 

Michael: What was the thought process behind the book? 

Dave: We felt it was time to memorialize the lightbulb moment that led to the inception of ScienceLogic and the story is intriguing. From our humble beginnings in a garage with limited funds, we were inspired by our conviction that there was a better way to help customers revolutionize their operational processes and the way they operate IT.  

The book chronicles this journey: why we started ScienceLogic, how technology has evolved, and how we’ve continually reinvented the company to stay aligned with the future and the global customer state we serve – customers who inspire us to do even more going forward. 

Michael: Initially, there was massive interest in AIOps, but it waned as skepticism grew over machine learning algorithms’ ability to adapt to unique IT environments. However, significant progress has been made since then. What’s your take on the current state of AIOps? 

Dave: A gap still exists between the architecture and customer need for a system that enables a truly self-learning and self-managing environment. In a perfect world, the system would understand historical patterns, changes, and anomalies, and quickly resolve the problem or issue before a service disruption occurs. That perfect world is what ScienceLogic is aiming for in our newest release, Hollywood.  

Hollywood aims to accelerate AIOps adoption by delivering a human-friendly platform that integrates generative AI insights with observability and automation to make the work of ITOps teams easier.  

Michael: How is generative AI being applied to AIOps? 

Dave: Generative AI is really good for certain classes of data sets, particularly human-generated data sets, such as chat logs, notes on issue resolutions, workflows for help desk problem-solving, and details from resolved tickets. Marrying that data with performance, fault, and configuration data, which ScienceLogic has been utilizing machine reasoning and algorithms since its inception, enables us to view data from a new perspective. We process trillions of data objects weekly across our customer base, deriving insights such as root cause analysis and potential remediation actions, which greatly elevate user experience and outcomes. 

So, in the context of AIOps, generative AI functions as a recommendation engine or trusted copilot, working alongside ITOps teams to enhance their comprehension of potential issues and their origins, thereby facilitating faster mean-time-to-repair. 

Michael: How is AI helping reshape IT jobs? 

Dave: The future of jobs in IT will change and evolve. And that’s a good thing. Take, for instance, Level 1 and 2 engineers, who are typically the initial responders in resolving issues. With the aid of AI and automation tools, acting as a copilot by their side, they can become exponentially more efficient. They’ll be empowered to tackle tasks that previously required the intervention of Level 3 engineers. For instance, with ScienceLogic, they can automatically sift through a sea of performance and environmental data, accurately identify root cause, and resolve issues on their own.  

This shift is expected to have a substantial impact over the next two to five years, as Level 1 and 2 engineers become more capable of doing Level 3 work.  

ScienceLogic is pioneering this evolution, allowing Level 3 engineers to focus on strategic business initiatives rather than being constantly blindsided by help desk escalations.  

Michael: IT is too complex to manage without the help of AI and machines. As I look around there are monoliths, microservices, serverless computer frameworks, and everything’s more distributed than ever. It seems like it’s unsustainable in its current form. 

Dave: I agree completely and that’s why I love this business. Whether it’s DevOps, ITOps, network engineering, or application development teams, there is such a diversity and heterogeneity of technologies that come together to deliver a service outcome. In some cases, we’ve seen applications that use a slither of almost all the architectures you’ve described, as one integrated service. Sometimes those services have nested services underneath them that do special things to deliver an outcome for an aggregate service. 

For the IT team to try to manage across it all is hard and that’s one of the things that the team at ScienceLogic is inspired to work on each day. We’ve crossed the chasm during our history, working on observability, metrics, traces, and logs across microservices applications, traditional highly virtualized applications, mainframe applications, and serverless applications – we can see across it all now.  

But what we’re finding is that customers usually have five or six tools to do this and that’s hard to manage. We set out to solve that problem from day one. However, the next technology keeps coming. Like waves crashing on a beach, it’s relentless. So, we’ve built an open, extensible architecture to solve this problem so we can adapt the platform to the next wave that’s coming.  

Watch Now! 

For more insights from Michael and Dave, check out the full interview here.

Copies of “Innovation: Journey and Outcomes for the AIOps Revolution” are available in an eBook format.