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Progressing Expectations in Advanced IT Analytics: How the Industry is Still Getting it Wrong - Part 1

Dennis Drogseth

New EMA research is just in on advanced IT analytics (AIA) and the results are telling. I'll be giving a webinar on April 13 with much more detail and insight than I can present here, but in this 2-part blog I wanted to share a few highlights — and a few opinions about the data — in advance.

We spoke to 250 respondents,100 in Europe and 150 in North America. Company size was 500 and above, and all respondents had some active levels of participation in AIA, including many roles across IT, a strong executive presence and a meaningful percentage of business stakeholders.

We could compare the results with earlier research in 2014 and there are some areas of marked advancement, and other data points that have remained surprisingly consistent. This year we focused ONLY on actual deployments, and we targeted two specific use cases:

■ Performance and availability analytics

■ Change and capacity/optimization analytics

However, we did ask proactively about security-driven analytics, which have become more and more intertwined with performance and change.

Rather than forcing a template of technologies or data sources on our respondents, our exploratory research let the "real world" of active AIA deployments define itself.

Here's Some of What We Learned

Maybe the biggest single surprise was that 100% of our respondents were using AIA for performance. Of these 60% were also using AIA for change management or capacity/optimization. What this indicates, of course, is that performance and availability are mainstream use-cases, a place to begin. Change management and capacity/optimization are next-step initiatives with generally more AIA technologies and more data sources, but, interestingly, slightly lower success rates.

Just a few other highlights are:

■ IT respondents wanted AIA coverage for more than 7 domains, 4 triage options, support and 4.5 business impact metrics.

■ In 2016 the average number of roles (domain, cross-domain and business) supported by AIA is 11 compared to 9 roles in 2014.

■ IT respondents seek to invest in nearly 4 distinct analytic technologies as a part of their AIA initiatives, and draw from 5 different types of data sources. The top analytic choices were process analytics and anomaly detection. The top two data sources were security information and event management (SIEM) and the Internet of Things (IoT). Both of these priorities were different from 2014 and suggest a yet broader use case focus with increasing interest on business alignment.

■ Respondents want to integrate about 15 monitoring or other third-party tool sources into an AIA investment.

■ The average respondent indicated about four unique benefits achieved via AIA. The top three were more efficient use of cloud resources, more efficient use of storage, and faster time to repair problems.

Progressing Expectations in Advanced IT Analytics: How the Industry is Still Getting it Wrong - Part 2

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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 ...

Progressing Expectations in Advanced IT Analytics: How the Industry is Still Getting it Wrong - Part 1

Dennis Drogseth

New EMA research is just in on advanced IT analytics (AIA) and the results are telling. I'll be giving a webinar on April 13 with much more detail and insight than I can present here, but in this 2-part blog I wanted to share a few highlights — and a few opinions about the data — in advance.

We spoke to 250 respondents,100 in Europe and 150 in North America. Company size was 500 and above, and all respondents had some active levels of participation in AIA, including many roles across IT, a strong executive presence and a meaningful percentage of business stakeholders.

We could compare the results with earlier research in 2014 and there are some areas of marked advancement, and other data points that have remained surprisingly consistent. This year we focused ONLY on actual deployments, and we targeted two specific use cases:

■ Performance and availability analytics

■ Change and capacity/optimization analytics

However, we did ask proactively about security-driven analytics, which have become more and more intertwined with performance and change.

Rather than forcing a template of technologies or data sources on our respondents, our exploratory research let the "real world" of active AIA deployments define itself.

Here's Some of What We Learned

Maybe the biggest single surprise was that 100% of our respondents were using AIA for performance. Of these 60% were also using AIA for change management or capacity/optimization. What this indicates, of course, is that performance and availability are mainstream use-cases, a place to begin. Change management and capacity/optimization are next-step initiatives with generally more AIA technologies and more data sources, but, interestingly, slightly lower success rates.

Just a few other highlights are:

■ IT respondents wanted AIA coverage for more than 7 domains, 4 triage options, support and 4.5 business impact metrics.

■ In 2016 the average number of roles (domain, cross-domain and business) supported by AIA is 11 compared to 9 roles in 2014.

■ IT respondents seek to invest in nearly 4 distinct analytic technologies as a part of their AIA initiatives, and draw from 5 different types of data sources. The top analytic choices were process analytics and anomaly detection. The top two data sources were security information and event management (SIEM) and the Internet of Things (IoT). Both of these priorities were different from 2014 and suggest a yet broader use case focus with increasing interest on business alignment.

■ Respondents want to integrate about 15 monitoring or other third-party tool sources into an AIA investment.

■ The average respondent indicated about four unique benefits achieved via AIA. The top three were more efficient use of cloud resources, more efficient use of storage, and faster time to repair problems.

Progressing Expectations in Advanced IT Analytics: How the Industry is Still Getting it Wrong - Part 2

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 ...