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Real-World AIOps: Between Data and Datasheets

Valerie O'Connell
EMA

Vendors and their visions often run ahead of the real-world pack — at least, the good ones do, because progress begins with vision. The downside of this rush to tomorrow is that IT practitioners can be left to ponder the practicality of technologies and wonder if their organization is ahead of the market curve or sliding behind in an invisible race that is always competitive.

Although AIOps is a relatively new category named within the past five years, it is based on the 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.

The needs are real, as are the vendor product and platform capabilities.

EMA completed an in-depth technical evaluation of 17 AIOps vendor offerings complete with user interviews as 2020 wrapped up publishing the results in EMA Radar Report: AIOps – A Guide for Investing in Innovation. The next logical step was to probe how widely those capabilities are being adopted beyond the datasheets, and with what results.

That's exactly what EMA did in its recent research, AI(work)Ops 2021. The outreach screened 2,500 global participants to vet the final field of IT practitioners for insight into how AIOps is being used now and in the near future. Use cases, drivers, challenges, and benefits were all addressed, as well as top capabilities and buying considerations. Much of the findings neatly align with common sense.

Perhaps the most surprising finding was not the fact that AIOps is successful, but the extent of that success. For the vast majority of respondents, AIOps implementations were self-rated as successful (19%), very successful (46%), and extremely successful (31%), all returning high value relative to cost.

Not since chocolate and peanut butter has there been a more natural pairing than AIOps and automation

Done right, the impact of AIOps on the relationship between IT and other parts of the business can be transformative. Use of AIOps makes improvement in IT/business alignment almost unavoidable. A large part of doing AIOps right is automation. Not since chocolate and peanut butter has there been a more natural pairing than AIOps and automation. In this case, the pairing is almost a survival mechanism in a world where success requires simultaneous execution of business agility and rock-solid IT service.

The case for AIOps and its attendant automation is so clear and such an exercise in common sense that EMA expects the name will quietly go away over time. The capabilities — new today — will just become an everyday part of everyday IT operations. However, that time is still quite a bit further out in time.

The good news is that vendor capabilities today far exceed common enterprise demands. Actual deployments and overall use currently lag well behind the potential of existing platforms. That gap will quickly close as enterprises continue to gain experience and return high levels of value. After all, success breeds success in AIOps as well as in life.

Join the Webinar: AI(work)Ops: A Research View of AIOps Implementations

Join Valerie O'Connell, EMA Research Director of Digital Service Execution, as she discusses her recent field research.

AI(work)Ops: A Research View of AIOps Implementations

Tuesday, May 18 9 a.m. Pacific | 12 p.m. Eastern

This research-based webinar from leading IT research firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) examines the characteristics that are common to the 21% of IT practitioners who rate the impact of AIOps on the IT/business relationship as "transformational." Topics will include:

- AIOps, automation, and digital transformation

- Key capabilities

- Indicators and metrics of success

- Organizational drivers and priorities

- Challenges and demonstrated benefits

- Budgets, buyers, and preferences

- Platform considerations

- Success factors

Valerie O'Connell is EMA Research Director of Digital Service Execution

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If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Real-World AIOps: Between Data and Datasheets

Valerie O'Connell
EMA

Vendors and their visions often run ahead of the real-world pack — at least, the good ones do, because progress begins with vision. The downside of this rush to tomorrow is that IT practitioners can be left to ponder the practicality of technologies and wonder if their organization is ahead of the market curve or sliding behind in an invisible race that is always competitive.

Although AIOps is a relatively new category named within the past five years, it is based on the 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.

The needs are real, as are the vendor product and platform capabilities.

EMA completed an in-depth technical evaluation of 17 AIOps vendor offerings complete with user interviews as 2020 wrapped up publishing the results in EMA Radar Report: AIOps – A Guide for Investing in Innovation. The next logical step was to probe how widely those capabilities are being adopted beyond the datasheets, and with what results.

That's exactly what EMA did in its recent research, AI(work)Ops 2021. The outreach screened 2,500 global participants to vet the final field of IT practitioners for insight into how AIOps is being used now and in the near future. Use cases, drivers, challenges, and benefits were all addressed, as well as top capabilities and buying considerations. Much of the findings neatly align with common sense.

Perhaps the most surprising finding was not the fact that AIOps is successful, but the extent of that success. For the vast majority of respondents, AIOps implementations were self-rated as successful (19%), very successful (46%), and extremely successful (31%), all returning high value relative to cost.

Not since chocolate and peanut butter has there been a more natural pairing than AIOps and automation

Done right, the impact of AIOps on the relationship between IT and other parts of the business can be transformative. Use of AIOps makes improvement in IT/business alignment almost unavoidable. A large part of doing AIOps right is automation. Not since chocolate and peanut butter has there been a more natural pairing than AIOps and automation. In this case, the pairing is almost a survival mechanism in a world where success requires simultaneous execution of business agility and rock-solid IT service.

The case for AIOps and its attendant automation is so clear and such an exercise in common sense that EMA expects the name will quietly go away over time. The capabilities — new today — will just become an everyday part of everyday IT operations. However, that time is still quite a bit further out in time.

The good news is that vendor capabilities today far exceed common enterprise demands. Actual deployments and overall use currently lag well behind the potential of existing platforms. That gap will quickly close as enterprises continue to gain experience and return high levels of value. After all, success breeds success in AIOps as well as in life.

Join the Webinar: AI(work)Ops: A Research View of AIOps Implementations

Join Valerie O'Connell, EMA Research Director of Digital Service Execution, as she discusses her recent field research.

AI(work)Ops: A Research View of AIOps Implementations

Tuesday, May 18 9 a.m. Pacific | 12 p.m. Eastern

This research-based webinar from leading IT research firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) examines the characteristics that are common to the 21% of IT practitioners who rate the impact of AIOps on the IT/business relationship as "transformational." Topics will include:

- AIOps, automation, and digital transformation

- Key capabilities

- Indicators and metrics of success

- Organizational drivers and priorities

- Challenges and demonstrated benefits

- Budgets, buyers, and preferences

- Platform considerations

- Success factors

Valerie O'Connell is EMA Research Director of Digital Service Execution

Hot Topics

The Latest

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...