AIOps has become one of the most popular "buzz words" in IT operations. Simply put, AIOps is the combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and IT Operations — the use of AI to better understand the mountains of data collected by IT Ops, and use that information to ensure better IT performance and other advantages.

According to Gartner, "AIOps combines big data and machine learning to automate IT operations processes, including event correlation, anomaly detection and causality determination."

AIOps could be seen as the next logical step, following IT analytics or ITOA (IT Operations Analytics).

EMA Research Report, AI(work)Ops 2021: The State of AIOps, explains, "Although AIOps is a relatively new category named within the past five years, it is based on a well-established awareness that advanced IT analytics has a lot to offer in the pursuit of operational excellence. Advances in big data, AI, ML, and IT operational complexity combined to match product capabilities with market needs. The otherwise hopeless complexity of clouds, microservices, and containers in an environment of high velocity change form the backdrop of IT's largescale adoption of AIOps."

"Recent EMA research, AI(work)Ops 2021: The State of AIOps, took a look at field realities," continues Valerie O'Connell, Research Director Digital Service Execution, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). "Clearly AIOps is in full swing across enterprises of all sizes, with more than 90% of organizations in active deployment. Although the discipline is still relatively new to IT (more than 60% of the implementations are less than two years in), there are big wins to be had — both quantifiable and qualitative. In fact, AIOps has a very high success rate (95%) and almost universally pays for itself. Without question, AIOps done even moderately well has a direct impact on the effectiveness of IT operations and the resultant quality of IT service delivered. Asked about the impact of AIOps on the IT/business relationship, 21% rated it as "transformational."

To produce this list, APMdigest asked the top minds in the industry — consultants, analysts and technology vendors — what they think AIOps can do for IT Operations. Over this week and next week, APMdigest will post their answers in 6 installments

As usual with the lists published on APMdigest, many of the advantages of AIOps listed overlap each other, just as they do in the real world. The goal of the list is not to produce a clean, definitive catalog of all the benefits of AIOps, but rather to explore and showcase just how many different advantages AIOps can produce and how many different perspectives the IT community has of AIOps — and hopefully to give you a greater vision of the potential for AIOps to impact your IT Operations.

And if you would like to hear more about AIOps, you should also check out a similar list posted on DEVOPSdigest: What Can AIOps Do For DevOps?

COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

AIOps is set to play an imperative role in the future of IT Operations. This is due to the swift expansion in data volumes and rate of change exemplified by the pace of application delivery and event-driven business models. Organizations that adopt AIOps will have a huge competitive advantage in fostering their IT Operations.
Raghu Krovvidy
President & Head, Global Delivery, Cigniti Technologies

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE

Digital experience is the IT outcome that matters most, and AIOps plays a critical role in improving service delivery that ultimately determines users' digital experience. However, to truly drive value for IT Ops teams, it's critical to solve one of today's most significant impediments to AIOps: end-to-end cross-domain awareness. As IT perimeters continue to erode and cloud and Internet networks become an integral part of the enterprise stack, IT Ops need access to the contextual glue between application and network traffic to see the associated interplay between the dependencies that impact digital experience. Put it another way, an AIOps platform that doesn't ingest Internet telemetry is like running a Formula One car without any visibility into track conditions. To optimize performance, you need the technology to guide you on what speed to take in the turns, when to change the tires, and when to fuel up.
Mike Hicks
Principal Solutions Architect, ThousandEyes

BUILDING AN AUTONOMOUS DIGITAL ENTERPRISE

AIOps can help IT Operations lead their company's evolution into an autonomous digital enterprise that embraces intelligent, tech-enabled systems across every facet of the business, by applying intelligence, machine learning, and advanced analytics to monitoring, resource planning, and automation.
Margaret Lee
SVP and GM of Digital Service and Operations Management, BMC Software

APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Because of AIOps, IT Operations can resolve incidents faster and improve the performance and availability of apps and services as part of the digital transformation revolution.
Mohan Kompella, VP Product Marketing,
Adam Blau, Director of Product Marketing,
Anirban Chatterjee, Director of Product Marketing, BigPanda

Check out IT OPS Pulse: Insights and Vision for IT Ops Leaders

APPLICATION RELIABILITY

In today's complex hybrid-cloud IT environment, AIOps is a critical component for any modern, digital business. AIOps platforms enhance IT operations by delivering greater insights through the integration of big data analytics, machine learning and visualization, all of which when combined, improve application reliability and overall customer experience.
Abel Gonzalez
Director of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

OPERATIONAL RESILIENCY

The status quo of telling IT Ops teams to chase down alerts once they make it into production won't cut it anymore. Companies must strive to become more responsive and intelligent — more resilient — to survive in an increasingly Hybrid IT landscape. A comprehensive AIOps strategy should support operational resiliency for the entire business IT estate — from ensuring a flawless experience for new customer-facing application functionality, to scalable data and business engines in cloud services, all the way to maintaining the availability of the enterprise's mainframe heart.
Jason English
Principal Analyst, Intellyx

Go to What Can AIOps Do For IT Ops? - Part 2