Skip to main content

Advanced IT Analytics, AIOps and Big Data - 7 Key Takeaways - Part 1

Dennis Drogseth

OK, the data is in! Three hundred respondents and analysis that took me multiple weeks and resulted in a summary deck of nearly 200 slides. And that's just the summary deck.

But I promise a much more focused exploration of the "IT analytic universe," one that's all digestible within 45 minutes (including Q&A), with the upcoming EMA webinar on October 10.

The goal of the research was to look at how advanced IT analytics (AIA) — or EMA's term for primarily what today is best known as "AIOps" — is being deployed, as mentioned in a prior APMdigest blog.

We asked what contributes to its success in terms of technology, process and best practices, organizational ownership, and functional priorities.

We also wanted to map how AIOps, or IT operations analytics, was being deployed in the context with other analytic technologies, such as big data, as well as more niche areas such as security-specific analytics, end-user-experience analytics, change management analytics, and capacity analytics.

We asked these questions to a respondent base that was about 2/3 North America, 1/3 Europe (England, Germany and France), across a wide range of roles. We got a solid IT executive presence, along with technical stakeholders such as data scientists, security-related stakeholders, and operational and IT service management (ITSM) stakeholders.

So what did we find?

Without giving away the heart and soul of the webinar, which will give you data to draw your own conclusions, here are seven of my own personal takeaways, some of which frankly surprised me.

1. AIOps is winning strategy

AIOps was the overall the winning strategy. While AIOps was not the most pervasive technology associated with advanced IT analytics in our research (big data led as the most prevalent before quotas), it was the most effective and pervasively advanced.

Indeed, AIOps showed the highest success rates, the greatest likelihood of supporting DevOps, IoT and AI bots, and led in use case capabilities as well.

2. AIA are eclectic in use case

Advanced IT analytics are eclectic in use case and becoming more so. Overall support for DevOps, IoT, AI bots, and multiple use cases including end-user experience, security, capacity analytics, cost-related optimization, show increasing diversity in need and value.

The implications of this are significant. AIOps and AIA more broadly are evolving as platform investments rather than niche solutions. This means that the data consumed and applied can be leveraged in multiple ways, bringing added benefits to the investment, while also helping to more effectively unify various roles, organizations and stakeholders across IT.

3. AI bots and automation

AI bots and automation are not a separate world from AIOps and AIA. The strong and perhaps surprising correlation between AI bots in use, AI bots as a sign of overall analytics success, and AI bot integrations into broader analytic directions all indicate that the AIOps "market" and the AI bots "market" should not be viewed in isolation.

This also helps to reinforce the critical handshake between automation and AI which was also reinforced by the research findings indicating that, on average, respondents targeted more than five automation integrations.

Read Advanced IT Analytics, AIOps and Big Data - 7 Key Takeaways - Part 2, covering 4 more key takeaways from EMA's research.

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

Advanced IT Analytics, AIOps and Big Data - 7 Key Takeaways - Part 1

Dennis Drogseth

OK, the data is in! Three hundred respondents and analysis that took me multiple weeks and resulted in a summary deck of nearly 200 slides. And that's just the summary deck.

But I promise a much more focused exploration of the "IT analytic universe," one that's all digestible within 45 minutes (including Q&A), with the upcoming EMA webinar on October 10.

The goal of the research was to look at how advanced IT analytics (AIA) — or EMA's term for primarily what today is best known as "AIOps" — is being deployed, as mentioned in a prior APMdigest blog.

We asked what contributes to its success in terms of technology, process and best practices, organizational ownership, and functional priorities.

We also wanted to map how AIOps, or IT operations analytics, was being deployed in the context with other analytic technologies, such as big data, as well as more niche areas such as security-specific analytics, end-user-experience analytics, change management analytics, and capacity analytics.

We asked these questions to a respondent base that was about 2/3 North America, 1/3 Europe (England, Germany and France), across a wide range of roles. We got a solid IT executive presence, along with technical stakeholders such as data scientists, security-related stakeholders, and operational and IT service management (ITSM) stakeholders.

So what did we find?

Without giving away the heart and soul of the webinar, which will give you data to draw your own conclusions, here are seven of my own personal takeaways, some of which frankly surprised me.

1. AIOps is winning strategy

AIOps was the overall the winning strategy. While AIOps was not the most pervasive technology associated with advanced IT analytics in our research (big data led as the most prevalent before quotas), it was the most effective and pervasively advanced.

Indeed, AIOps showed the highest success rates, the greatest likelihood of supporting DevOps, IoT and AI bots, and led in use case capabilities as well.

2. AIA are eclectic in use case

Advanced IT analytics are eclectic in use case and becoming more so. Overall support for DevOps, IoT, AI bots, and multiple use cases including end-user experience, security, capacity analytics, cost-related optimization, show increasing diversity in need and value.

The implications of this are significant. AIOps and AIA more broadly are evolving as platform investments rather than niche solutions. This means that the data consumed and applied can be leveraged in multiple ways, bringing added benefits to the investment, while also helping to more effectively unify various roles, organizations and stakeholders across IT.

3. AI bots and automation

AI bots and automation are not a separate world from AIOps and AIA. The strong and perhaps surprising correlation between AI bots in use, AI bots as a sign of overall analytics success, and AI bot integrations into broader analytic directions all indicate that the AIOps "market" and the AI bots "market" should not be viewed in isolation.

This also helps to reinforce the critical handshake between automation and AI which was also reinforced by the research findings indicating that, on average, respondents targeted more than five automation integrations.

Read Advanced IT Analytics, AIOps and Big Data - 7 Key Takeaways - Part 2, covering 4 more key takeaways from EMA's research.

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...