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IT Ops Pros Reconsidering IT Ops Tools

IT budgets have held up quite well despite the pandemic, and the majority of IT executives (63%) were actually accelerating or maintaining their digital transformation initiatives, according to a study by OpsRamp study of 230 IT operations executives in the US and UK. The same IT ops pros said they were focused on buying tools that enabled compelling customer and employee experiences.

There are three main takeaways :

■ IT ops pros are swimming in tools.

■ Artificial intelligence-based tools are a big deal.

■ The definition of a modern IT ops platform is changing.

Trend #1: Too Many Tools

Only 27% of respondents from the study are highly satisfied with their current monitoring approaches.

52% are moderately satisfied and 21% are somewhat dissatisfied or not at all satisfied.

Areas of improvement for existing tools include the ability to monitor hybrid, multi-cloud and cloud-native infrastructure, integrate data and automate incident response for efficient and timely operations, and support business goals with accurate and relevant insights.

Meanwhile, nearly all IT ops pros (95%) surveyed by OpsRamp said they’re using at least five tools every day and half are using more than 10. Apparently, though, that’s about to change, with 37% saying they expect to cut the number of tools they use this year by half.

Trend #2: AIOps is Here to Stay

AIOps has become a focal point for this "tool rationalization," as the technology appears to have sufficiently demonstrated its ability to act as a sort of connective tissue for centralized operations by delivering proactive insights across different IT monitoring, service management and process automation tools.

The results of OpsRamp’s 2021 study back this up, with 48% of respondents saying they have prioritized AIOps across their enterprise IT environments.

The 2021 study also found that 42% of IT ops pros have already deployed AIOps in their organisation, and 55% plan to roll out AIOps this year.

Trend #3: Requirements for a Modern IT Ops Solution

Given the strong recent media attention on hacks and data vulnerabilities, it’s not surprising that the study found that platform security, which is the ability to withstand sophisticated attacks, is the most critical attribute of a modern IT ops solution (61%).

The next two capabilities ranked important by IT ops pros were hybrid infrastructure management (53%) for controlling the chaos of distributed architectures, and SaaS and multi-tenant architecture (46%) that allow IT to manage hybrid infrastructure from the cloud, without introducing additional system overhead.

IT ops leaders also see huge value in deploying a digital operations management platform that offers capabilities for hybrid, multi-cloud and cloud-native monitoring, intelligent incident management and automated remediation. 56% of respondents to OpsRamp’s 2021 study expect to roll out a digital operations management platform this year.

George Bonser, VP of EMEA Sales for OpsRamp, said: "The pandemic accelerated many of the mid-flight digital transformation initiatives. Tools are a valuable part of the IT operations portfolio, but the future belongs to digital operations management platforms that can consolidate data across hybrid environments, apply machine learning to drive faster incident analysis, and use process automation to handle repetitive work."

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IT Ops Pros Reconsidering IT Ops Tools

IT budgets have held up quite well despite the pandemic, and the majority of IT executives (63%) were actually accelerating or maintaining their digital transformation initiatives, according to a study by OpsRamp study of 230 IT operations executives in the US and UK. The same IT ops pros said they were focused on buying tools that enabled compelling customer and employee experiences.

There are three main takeaways :

■ IT ops pros are swimming in tools.

■ Artificial intelligence-based tools are a big deal.

■ The definition of a modern IT ops platform is changing.

Trend #1: Too Many Tools

Only 27% of respondents from the study are highly satisfied with their current monitoring approaches.

52% are moderately satisfied and 21% are somewhat dissatisfied or not at all satisfied.

Areas of improvement for existing tools include the ability to monitor hybrid, multi-cloud and cloud-native infrastructure, integrate data and automate incident response for efficient and timely operations, and support business goals with accurate and relevant insights.

Meanwhile, nearly all IT ops pros (95%) surveyed by OpsRamp said they’re using at least five tools every day and half are using more than 10. Apparently, though, that’s about to change, with 37% saying they expect to cut the number of tools they use this year by half.

Trend #2: AIOps is Here to Stay

AIOps has become a focal point for this "tool rationalization," as the technology appears to have sufficiently demonstrated its ability to act as a sort of connective tissue for centralized operations by delivering proactive insights across different IT monitoring, service management and process automation tools.

The results of OpsRamp’s 2021 study back this up, with 48% of respondents saying they have prioritized AIOps across their enterprise IT environments.

The 2021 study also found that 42% of IT ops pros have already deployed AIOps in their organisation, and 55% plan to roll out AIOps this year.

Trend #3: Requirements for a Modern IT Ops Solution

Given the strong recent media attention on hacks and data vulnerabilities, it’s not surprising that the study found that platform security, which is the ability to withstand sophisticated attacks, is the most critical attribute of a modern IT ops solution (61%).

The next two capabilities ranked important by IT ops pros were hybrid infrastructure management (53%) for controlling the chaos of distributed architectures, and SaaS and multi-tenant architecture (46%) that allow IT to manage hybrid infrastructure from the cloud, without introducing additional system overhead.

IT ops leaders also see huge value in deploying a digital operations management platform that offers capabilities for hybrid, multi-cloud and cloud-native monitoring, intelligent incident management and automated remediation. 56% of respondents to OpsRamp’s 2021 study expect to roll out a digital operations management platform this year.

George Bonser, VP of EMEA Sales for OpsRamp, said: "The pandemic accelerated many of the mid-flight digital transformation initiatives. Tools are a valuable part of the IT operations portfolio, but the future belongs to digital operations management platforms that can consolidate data across hybrid environments, apply machine learning to drive faster incident analysis, and use process automation to handle repetitive work."

Hot Topics

The Latest

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 ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...