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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.

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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

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...