Built-in monitoring/native instrumentation ranked as the most important feature of an AIOps solution, cited by nearly 55% of respondents in a new study from OpsRamp, The State of AIOps 2023.

The study concludes that AIOps is delivering real benefits for enterprises and MSPs, even as two-thirds of respondents have concerns about how accurate the data going into their AIOps systems is.

With the global economy facing headwinds on multiple fronts including inflation, the cost-of-living crisis, higher interest rates and war in Ukraine, both enterprises and MSPs are focused on improving IT efficiency and automation in 2023. MSPs cited improving operational efficiencies as their No. 1 challenge to achieving steady growth and profitability, while enterprises pointed to automating as many operations as possible as the biggest need or challenge they were trying to overcome in 2023.

While more than 60% of respondents were adopting AIOps to improve service and application availability and performance, the second and third top choices were for automation of operations (58%) and processes (54%).

Meanwhile, the greatest IT operations challenge for enterprises in 2023 was automating as many operations as possible, cited by 66% of respondents. Yet barely half of respondents (52%) cited automation of tedious tasks as their primary operational benefit of AIOps, trailing reduction in open incident tickets (65%) and reduction in MTTD and MTTR (56%). Improvements in automation are clearly top of mind for enterprises and MSPs in 2023.

Other key findings include:

■ Application to infrastructure dependency mapping is the top incident management challenge for enterprises and MSPs, cited by 64% of total respondents.

■ Intelligent alerting is the No. 1 use case for AIOps today for both enterprises (70%) and MSPs (66%).

■ The vast majority of AIOps implementations—more than 80%—take six months or less.

■ Data accuracy was respondents' biggest concern about AIOps, cited by 70% of MSPs and 62% of enterprises.

■ AIOps is creating jobs, not killing them, though engineers with the right skillsets for AIOps remain hard to find. Just 36% of respondents were concerned about AIOps deployment causing job loss while 68% said it takes more than six months to hire engineers with the right skillsets for AIOps

"The study shows that AIOps is real and is delivering tangible benefits for enterprises and MSPs," said Suresh Vobbilesetty, EVP, Engineering at OpsRamp. "But it also shows that organizations' AIOps initiatives remain a work in progress and have a ways to go before they can realize the full potential of the technology."

Methodology: The study was conducted in December by a third party research firm, and includes input from 265 respondents who work at the general manager, director or vice president level at enterprises and MSPs in North America, Europe or Asia Pacific. All respondents have budget decision-making responsibilities for IT monitoring tools, and work at firms with at least $25 million in annual revenue and more than 500 employees.