The AI journey to discovery and achieving IT mastery

What if artificial intelligence (AI) could prevent 1,000 potential outages and improve IT service health and delivery by more than 75%? IT teams would sleep better, but that’s just the start.

The power of AI operations (AIOps) and ServiceOps, including BMC Helix Discovery, can transform how you optimize IT operations (ITOps), change management, and service delivery. Below, I recap my virtual event conversation with two IT leaders, who shared their first-hand experience of the benefits that BMC Helix solutions have delivered in respective use cases.

Improving IT operations with AIOps and ServiceOps

Jason Rush, senior director, DevOps at BMC, and his team that supports BMC software-as-a-service (SaaS) customers, were dealing with an extremely high volume of alerts and needed better ways to handle incidents. New migrations and continuous features were being deployed, and the team was unable to prioritize process optimization and noise reduction efforts.

“When you’re in a constant state of firefighting with a lot of noise, you don’t really have the opportunity to optimize,” Rush explained.

About two years ago, Rush implemented BMC ServiceOps, AIOps, and observability to improve on several operational efficiency and service delivery goals. By adopting BMC’s ServiceOps solutions and a revamped approach to improve operations, Rush and his team were able to employ a more proactive and automated approach to service and operations management.

Since implementing ServiceOps, Rush’s team has accomplished a range of goals, from reducing noise to faster problem resolution:

• Reduced the high volume of redundant alerts coming in
• Improved efficiency in resolving incidents
• Accelerated root cause identification using causal AI
• Significantly reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR)
• Implemented intelligent, automated remediation solutions
• Cut costs and eliminated toil in manual incident remediation
• Enabled better collaboration between monitoring and tools teams
• Improved outage prevention with more proactive actions

By coupling ServiceOps with BMC Helix AIOps, Rush’s team transformed from reactive to proactive incident management. They automated remediation and significantly improved MTTR and overall service quality. Rush’s team also achieved many operational efficiency goals and were able to measure the impact of ServiceOps:

• $669,000 projected cost savings in 2024 with improved automation and remediation
• 3,680 successful remediations from seven intelligent automations within one month
• Greater than 60% MTTR reduction
• 64% of outages prevented using ServiceOps, AIOps and observability

Optimizing change management and modernizing service management

As an IT service manager IV at an insurance company in Cincinnati, Chas Eddingfield has used BMC solutions for the past several years. The company’s more recent adoption of BMC ServiceOps has transformed change management processes and IT services management (ITSM) success for his organization.

The insurance company decided to migrate from on-premises BMC Remedy to cloud-based BMC Helix ITSM and Discovery. The primary goal for Eddingfield and his team was to improve change management processes and reduce the risk of failed changes by implementing collision detection and impact analysis.

Collision detection identifies potential conflicts between proposed changes with a visual representation of changes scheduled at the same time, enabling IT teams to proactively manage and resolve potentially harmful conflicts. By understanding potential collisions in advance, Eddingfield and his team proactively prevented simultaneous changes that could lead to outages or unsuccessful deployments. BMC Helix ITSM instilled confidence that deployed changes would always improve performance and reliability.

In addition, by using BMC Helix Digital Workplace, Eddingfield and his organization significantly expanded self-service capabilities, giving end users independent access to a much wider range of IT services. Now the IT team provides:

• Enhanced self-service capabilities with more than 75 available end-user service requests
• Automated maintenance using BMC Helix Discovery, saving time for the IT team
• Ability to dynamically maintain more than 300 applications
• More efficient support for ITSM processes
• Increased accuracy in outage detection
• Improved reporting of IT goals and service level agreements in BMC Helix dashboards
• Enhanced vulnerability detection capabilities
• Better documentation and easy detection of undocumented changes

“It’s an ongoing effort that will go on forever,” Eddingfield said “Discovery work is never done. BMC Helix Discovery helps identify all outages, from code, infrastructure to user, and to configuration. It allows us to have an automated solution we can utilize and rely on to be accurate.”

Improving service reliability with AIOps and ServiceOps

ServiceOps and AIOps help IT teams improve service reliability and reduce downtime by:

• Proactively preventing outages
• Unifying change visibility and governance
• Balancing the speed of innovation with risk mitigation
• Accelerating the speed of change and innovation
• Unifying IT operations and service management teams through automation
• Improving collaboration and eliminating team silos
• Predicting and mitigating risks before changes are implemented
• Providing business context and dependency mapping across the entire IT estate

Now is the time for your IT organization to begin its AI journey to AIOps, Discovery, and ServiceOps. Visit here for more information or contact BMC.

About the author:

Stela Udovicic is the senior director, solutions marketing management at BMC Software