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A Fresh Look at Advanced IT Analytics - Why the Industry Continues to Get it Wrong

Dennis Drogseth

Buzzwords in tech (like politics) do a lot to call attention to themselves, but they don't always do a very good job of calling attention to the truth. Reality, after all, is often mystifyingly multi-dimensional, while "what's hot" tends to become linear and often cartoonish.

Over the last few years I've tried to represent a clear and growing trend that I've come to call "Advanced IT Analytics" or AIA, in contrast with other industry terms such as "IT Operations Analytics" and "Big Data". My issue with the former is that AIA isn't restricted to operations, but can reach out across all of IT, including executives, service desk and ITSM teams, development and even non-IT business stakeholders. It is multi-use case and multi-stakeholder in value, as the same data mosaic may serve performance, security, change management, and DevOps requirements, while also supporting business stakeholders in areas such as customer experience and market planning.

My issue with "big data" is that when it comes to AIA, just taking big data by itself misses the point. While AIA often thrives on significant volumes of data across multiple domains, what's key to the more progressive AIA solutions are its powers to interrelate and analyze data with a clear eye to meaningful outcomes. Genetically (taking the term metaphorically) I would argue that AIA is not primarily an outgrowth of business intelligence and big data pots, including NoSQL options like Hadoop and Cassandra. Rather, AIA grew out of advanced self-learning tools targeting far more finite data sources, such as time-series data directed at service performance outcomes, or even advanced event correlation.

What made AIA distinctive early on was its ability to assimilate data from many different toolsets and create a common fabric of intelligence that crossed domain silos. These tools often had surprising options for predicting future outcomes and discovering patterns that were not looked for or sought after. They also had political and social challenges from IT siloed communities refusing to give up their own siloed toolset preeminence or even share their data with others in IT. These benefits (and these political issues) continue even as AIA continues to evolve to include many new options, including big data pots in some cases.

What we're witnessing now is, I believe, a great deal of industry confusion about how to go about bringing advanced analytics to the IT community — aggravated inevitably by both marketing hype, and, sadly, boxed-in categories from the analyst community wedded far too much to technology and far too little to use case. AIA is, in fact, especially a challenge because it tends to support a diversity of use cases, making it less like a traditional market and more like an architectural revolution (or evolution) in next-generation business service management. Or given current buzzword pre-eminence, let's make that digital service management. At least here the buzzword really does have some genuine meaning and value.

So I'd like to go back to what I believe are AIA's roots. These include tiered or blended capabilities to assimilate data from many different sources — either from many different toolset investments (in recent research our respondents indicated 10-20 toolsets either directly or via an aggregated data store); and/or from a wide variety of sources ranging from transactional data including user and customer behaviors, to log files, to packets and wire data, to events, to Excel spreadsheets, and unstructured data as in text and social media.

What also distinguishes AIA is a unique ability to link critical IT business service interdependencies for both change and performance in context with event, time series, transaction and other data. While many of our research respondents sought out interdependency mapping within the analytics solution itself, probably the most frequent linkage in real adoptions comes from the application discovery and dependency (ADDM) arena, as well as newer, more dynamic instances of CMDBs and federated configuration management systems (CMSs).

The net values of good AIA solutions include much faster time to value and far less administrative overhead than massive data lakes that are created virtually as an end in themselves. The ability to assimilate many multiple "trusted sources" and discover new and unexpected values needn't be an investment in an army of white coats. It can be — in some cases at least — surprisingly dynamic and self-administrating.

This AIA tidal wave is still new. Still a relatively small and distant rise in the information technology ocean. Yet there are already a growing number of AIA innovators with different directions and focus — from cloud, to integrated DevOps and change management, to user and customer and digital experience optimization.

I will be presenting a webinar on November 10 — with a better chance to explain the values of tiered or blended AIA. And I'll be following up with some new research to be completed in Q1 of next year: "Advanced IT Analytics Part II: Deployment Priorities and Lessons Learned." Hopefully the data will reinforce what I believe should be AIA progress toward more effective advanced analytics for IT, and not a sudden dip into white-coated chaos. But then you never know — that's part of the appeal of doing research. Invariably, if it's any good, it will always teach you something new.

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A Fresh Look at Advanced IT Analytics - Why the Industry Continues to Get it Wrong

Dennis Drogseth

Buzzwords in tech (like politics) do a lot to call attention to themselves, but they don't always do a very good job of calling attention to the truth. Reality, after all, is often mystifyingly multi-dimensional, while "what's hot" tends to become linear and often cartoonish.

Over the last few years I've tried to represent a clear and growing trend that I've come to call "Advanced IT Analytics" or AIA, in contrast with other industry terms such as "IT Operations Analytics" and "Big Data". My issue with the former is that AIA isn't restricted to operations, but can reach out across all of IT, including executives, service desk and ITSM teams, development and even non-IT business stakeholders. It is multi-use case and multi-stakeholder in value, as the same data mosaic may serve performance, security, change management, and DevOps requirements, while also supporting business stakeholders in areas such as customer experience and market planning.

My issue with "big data" is that when it comes to AIA, just taking big data by itself misses the point. While AIA often thrives on significant volumes of data across multiple domains, what's key to the more progressive AIA solutions are its powers to interrelate and analyze data with a clear eye to meaningful outcomes. Genetically (taking the term metaphorically) I would argue that AIA is not primarily an outgrowth of business intelligence and big data pots, including NoSQL options like Hadoop and Cassandra. Rather, AIA grew out of advanced self-learning tools targeting far more finite data sources, such as time-series data directed at service performance outcomes, or even advanced event correlation.

What made AIA distinctive early on was its ability to assimilate data from many different toolsets and create a common fabric of intelligence that crossed domain silos. These tools often had surprising options for predicting future outcomes and discovering patterns that were not looked for or sought after. They also had political and social challenges from IT siloed communities refusing to give up their own siloed toolset preeminence or even share their data with others in IT. These benefits (and these political issues) continue even as AIA continues to evolve to include many new options, including big data pots in some cases.

What we're witnessing now is, I believe, a great deal of industry confusion about how to go about bringing advanced analytics to the IT community — aggravated inevitably by both marketing hype, and, sadly, boxed-in categories from the analyst community wedded far too much to technology and far too little to use case. AIA is, in fact, especially a challenge because it tends to support a diversity of use cases, making it less like a traditional market and more like an architectural revolution (or evolution) in next-generation business service management. Or given current buzzword pre-eminence, let's make that digital service management. At least here the buzzword really does have some genuine meaning and value.

So I'd like to go back to what I believe are AIA's roots. These include tiered or blended capabilities to assimilate data from many different sources — either from many different toolset investments (in recent research our respondents indicated 10-20 toolsets either directly or via an aggregated data store); and/or from a wide variety of sources ranging from transactional data including user and customer behaviors, to log files, to packets and wire data, to events, to Excel spreadsheets, and unstructured data as in text and social media.

What also distinguishes AIA is a unique ability to link critical IT business service interdependencies for both change and performance in context with event, time series, transaction and other data. While many of our research respondents sought out interdependency mapping within the analytics solution itself, probably the most frequent linkage in real adoptions comes from the application discovery and dependency (ADDM) arena, as well as newer, more dynamic instances of CMDBs and federated configuration management systems (CMSs).

The net values of good AIA solutions include much faster time to value and far less administrative overhead than massive data lakes that are created virtually as an end in themselves. The ability to assimilate many multiple "trusted sources" and discover new and unexpected values needn't be an investment in an army of white coats. It can be — in some cases at least — surprisingly dynamic and self-administrating.

This AIA tidal wave is still new. Still a relatively small and distant rise in the information technology ocean. Yet there are already a growing number of AIA innovators with different directions and focus — from cloud, to integrated DevOps and change management, to user and customer and digital experience optimization.

I will be presenting a webinar on November 10 — with a better chance to explain the values of tiered or blended AIA. And I'll be following up with some new research to be completed in Q1 of next year: "Advanced IT Analytics Part II: Deployment Priorities and Lessons Learned." Hopefully the data will reinforce what I believe should be AIA progress toward more effective advanced analytics for IT, and not a sudden dip into white-coated chaos. But then you never know — that's part of the appeal of doing research. Invariably, if it's any good, it will always teach you something new.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...