The evolution of IT optimization is AIOps

It could be said that the beginning of the IT optimization movement started with monitoring. The idea behind IT monitoring is that it determines how IT infrastructure and its underlying components perform in real time in order to make data-driven decisions for resource provisioning, IT security, or to evaluate usage trends.

But monitoring was just the beginning. Observability was the next phase. And while it’s been around for about 10 years, in the last few years it’s really started to gain traction — especially with business imperatives like moving to the cloud and supporting remote workers.

Unfortunately, for many large enterprises, a lot of the efforts to optimize IT systems using observability data has led to tool sprawl and more work for IT professionals to manage the tools versus the value they bring to the business. It is not uncommon for large enterprises to have 15 to 20 observability tools. That produces too many signals for IT to sift through, which overwhelms IT teams. It’s difficult to make sense of all of these signals — especially when dealing with major incidents.

For IT leaders, applying the appropriate technology to the task at hand becomes imperative when dealing with alert deluge, complexity, rapid changes, and fast-paced innovation.

AIOps can help you deliver IT optimization with the bonus of automation

The right artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) solutions in your environment can help make sense of the mountain of data coming in from observability tools, and even automate issue remediations at the service level. This helps make sure all of your business services are optimized, automated, and delivering for your customers, employees, and other end-users.

AIOps and observability data work better together

AIOps uses AI and machine learning (ML) to automate IT Ops, from reconciling and analyzing data collected by various sources —including observability tools — to conducting root cause analysis and automated remediations. AIOps is a prescriptive and proactive means to direct IT teams to the source of problems with high confidence and context, ultimately reducing or eliminating the time spent troubleshooting an issue.

Good AIOps platforms can take in volumes of data natively or from integrations with other tools, reconcile and normalize that data, and provide a unified view (east-west) across IT domains — proactively pointing IT teams to the source of problems and often preventing an incident from becoming a larger issue that impacts the business. AIOps focuses on automatic problem resolution and preventing emerging potential incidents from happening.

AIOps provides more insights and actions than observability alone

AIOps provides a real-time, action-oriented solution that drives business results. Good AIOps solutions simply go a step further than observability solutions by:

• Reconciling ingested data and providing a unified view (east-west) across disparate tools and domains. Conversely, observability tools have been used to explore data after a problem occurs and within the observability domain (north-south), often isolated from other observability domains.
• Automating problem resolution and preventing incidents from happening versus observability tools, which only enable data exploration.
• Reducing noise and performing root cause analysis versus observability data, which is used for interactive exploration.
• Focusing on automation and intelligent remediation using AI/ML versus observability, which focuses on data collection and investigation.
• Using predictive algorithms to optimize service assurance versus observability, which uses capacity planning purposes in semi-automated ways.
• Providing best action recommendations based on the past and in real-time, ML-driven insights versus observability, which provides explorative iteration.

How AIOps delivers value for IT organizations

Enterprise IT organizations today are already seeing the gains of applying AIOps across their environments using BMC solutions.

BMC’s AIOps is powered by its composite AI, including causal, predictive, and generative AI (BMC HelixGPT) solutions, which automate traditional incident analysis and offers a clear, plain-language summary of the problem — as well as information about how the same problems were solved in the past.

Using composite AI, an AIOps solution can detect an anomaly, generate a summary of the incident, and suggest a best action recommendation (BAR). Automated incident resolution, with AI and generative AI (genAI) functionality, prevents downtime and allows IT to perform health checks preemptively, improving overall system reliability and resilience.

AIOps can also accelerate troubleshooting workflows by providing predefined prompts to answer questions that lead to better understanding of complex systems, and ultimately, faster resolution. Using a solution such as Ask BMC HelixGPT speeds up the process and results in quicker resolutions.

GenAI functionality in AIOps solutions such as BMC Helix helps IT teams confidently conduct changes, mitigating the risk that a change will negatively impact the environment. Our AIOps approach, coupled with ServiceOps, enables flexible-change risk management and automated or hybrid change governance.

AIOps can also use its knowledge of historical usage patterns and business trends to accurately predict future resource demands. This helps prevent outages and optimizes operations by allowing enterprise IT to run what-if scenarios to right-size capacities for user demands. In this scenario, AIOps helps organizations proactively plan for capacity, ensuring both performance and cost efficiency.

Are you ready to achieve real business value with AIOps?

AIOps solutions can create a core competitive advantage for the entire organization, with BMC customers having achieved results like:

• 100% uptime for their business services
• 100% visibility across their IT environment
• More than 70% reduction in incident volume
• $1 million in infrastructure cost savings
• $2.3 million in reduced tool-sprawl savings
• Productivity savings from freeing the time of up to 96 full time-employees

Start driving business outcomes with AIOps. Click here to learn more about BMC AIOps solutions and how we can help you transform your IT landscape.

To schedule a consultation with BMC to start transforming your IT organization, click here.