On March 26, EMA will be presenting a webinar with some surprising facts based on our Radar — AIOps: A Guide to Investing in Innovation.

In the course of EMA research over the last twelve years, the message for IT organizations looking to pursue a forward path in AIOps adoption is overall a strongly positive one. The benefits achieved are growing in diversity and value. The obstacles do remain similar, as they reflect not only on a technology purchase, but also on processes, organizations, and cultural realities.

In selecting and then evaluating the thirteen vendors included in this Radar report, our key criteria included:

■ Capabilities for self-learning to deliver predictive, prescriptive, preventative, and if/then actionable insights

■ Support for a wide range of advanced heuristics, such as multivariate analysis, machine learning, streaming data, tiered analytics, cognitive analytics, and generative AI

■ Potential use as a strategic overlay to assimilate or consolidate multiple monitoring and other toolset investments

■ Advanced levels of integrated automation to facilitate communication and action

■ Discovery and dependency mapping for enhanced analytic context

■ Support for private and public cloud, as well as hybrid and legacy environments

■ Assimilation of data from cross-domain sources in high data volumes for real-time and historical cross-domain awareness.

■ With an eye on observability, we also examined a breadth of data types (e.g., events, metrics, logs, flow, traces, configurations, etc.) with a growing move toward open source data and OpenTelemetry.

Our methodology for the Radar required that EMA complete the following steps with each of the thirteen vendors in this report:

■ Finalizing a questionnaire and sharing it with vendor – with key categories: deployment and administration, cost advantage, architecture, functionality, and vendor strength

■ Reviewing vendor inputs in a series of digital and conversational interactions

■ Interviewing customers to validate vendor claims — with 21 interviews in total

■ Analyzing the results in December 2023 and developing Radar Chart positioning and the profiles in January 2024

■ Final reviews and report generation in February/March 2024

In this webinar you'll see how and where each of the thirteen vendor positions based overall product strength (the vertical axis) and cost and administrative effectiveness (the horizontal axis).

The AIOps marketplace is clearly evolving at an accelerated rate, with an average of 100% growth in AIOps-related revenue across the thirteen vendors since 2020, with customer bases sometimes tripling or more. Both OpenTelemetry and generative AI have redefined the market in creative and positive ways. Deployment time is accelerating, along with time to achieve ROI. Volume and quality of data breadth has been substantially on the rise. And the ability to promote more informed collaboration across IT, as well as between IT and the business, is also accelerating at AIOps pace.

And indeed, 2023 was an explosive year for generative AI, with the momentum very much moving into the present. Eleven of the thirteen vendors introduced new generative AI capabilities. Some of the key areas of focus were:

■ Troubleshooting and/or analytics summarization

■ Recommendations for taking action

■ Action/automation (e.g., configuration automation, patch management, or accelerating workflow development)

■ Generating trouble ticket summaries, or more broadly improving ITSM efficiencies

■ Post-mortem analysis and recommendations for improvement

In customer interviews we looked at vendor selection, deployment, and benefits. The two following quotes are telling examples:

"We had monitoring systems all over the place, but nothing to bring them together. Our AIOps platform took all the puzzle pieces for root causes and alerts and delivered a common analysis across the broader spectrum."

"They've helped us build a bridge between the business and operations, providing tailored dashboard views driven from the same event and enrichment data, avoiding conflicts between the varied support and business areas."

AIOps can and should be transformative in enabling more effective decision-making, data sharing, and analytics-driven automation. But which vendor can most effectively address your top prioritized near-term and long-term goals?

Which vendor is a most natural fit for your current technology environment?

What roles need to be supported across Operations, ITSM, DevOps, Security, and business stakeholders?

This Radar helps to provide answers to all these questions and more in a multidimensional manner.