AIOps Unleashed: How Automation Powers a Global Enterprise from Reactive to Proactive

It’s not every day that you get to ‘reinvent the wheel’ by transforming one of the largest IT operations in the world. But for one global systems integrator’s IT organization, which supports all infrastructure and application services for its 360,000 employees, there is a massive opportunity to use AIOps to drive a digital transformation that would stabilize the network operations center, reduce operational costs, improve the user experience, and provide a more predictive operations model.

As a global IT services leader supporting other industry technology leaders, they have a responsibility to invest in innovation that supports their stability and growth. With such high stakes, it’s imperative that they always have an eye on what it will take to ensure future success.

At the beginning of their AIOps journey, they were focused on three primary challenges:

• A lack of visibility: While their aggressive acquisition strategy helped them grow their organization quickly, it created an environment of many siloed monitoring tools, which were only able to monitor 30% of new technology deployments. They had no real-time business service visibility, and a CMDB that was both incomplete and inaccurate.
• High incident noise/Long MTTR: Each year, they experienced significant incident noise — more than 50,000 incidents, 250 of which were major infrastructure incidents. On the response side, their average MTTR was 5 hours, and each major infrastructure incident required 7 FTEs for resolution.
• A reactive approach: Initially, without proactive business measures enabled, they were forced to act in a purely reactive way, chasing issues. This made them slow to respond to users or address the business’ needs.

In order to stabilize their infrastructure, they needed to understand what was being monitored and by which tools, while turning on 24×7 end-to-end monitoring across its hybrid environment. They also needed to look closely at user experience compliance by studying SLAs, incorporate predictive automations, and reduce the extra incident and event noise. Finally, to help reduce unnecessary operational costs and provide more visibility, They needed to move from asset-based monitoring to service-based monitoring, expand end-to-end services, and build out integrations to its CMDB.

ScienceLogic’s SL1 AIOps platform is purpose-built to significantly reduce enterprise efforts on IT incident management and resolution. It provides end-to-end visibility and increases productivity by decreasing incident resolution time and automating and remediating issues, and ticket creation, enrichment, and alerting. SL1 reduces the noise and corresponding hours of manual labor with automation and smart analytics that enable better business outcomes.

The investment in SL1 helped them achieve several mission-critical business goals. It greatly enhanced their observability practices, and transformed their global IT NOC in a way that resulted in reduced operational costs, created a better user experience, reduced event and incident noise, improved business service visibility, and increased incident automation. Specific results included:

• 50% reduction of MTTR
• Mean time to detect target is 90%
• 30% reduction in response time
• 100% monitoring of 35,000 devices (up from 30%)
• 66% reduction of incident noise
• 38% reduction in major incidents
• 32K hours productivity gains (automated ticketing & routing)
• 7 disparate tools eliminated
• 40 new dashboards created at the device layer, service layer, and business services layer

By focusing on user experience and adding event enrichment and automation, they have greatly improved the engineer response times and incident resolution speed. Smart self-healing work, especially on the data centers, has helped the networks with much better uptime.

Implementing AIOps is an enormous and complex undertaking for any organization, but especially for a global organization operating at scale. It has helped their business start to make the all-important shift from being reactive to being proactive and working to being predictive. This delivers immediate business benefits and positions them for long-term future success.

“ScienceLogic brought in the expertise, the right consultants to support us, to design the solution, to implement the solution, to realize the outcome, and we’re now in a position to build a better future for our global infrastructure,” says Anonymous Infrastructure Executive.