The cloud is driving enterprise digital transformation. Gartner predicts that by 2026, public cloud spending will exceed 45% of all enterprise IT spending, a 2.5x growth from 2021. Enterprises globally are accelerating application modernization, embracing the cloud. This is giving rise to a few key trends. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) adoption is on the rise. So, organizations are using applications whose implementation/infrastructure they have little or no control over.

Alerts are notifications from AIOps monitoring tools that indicate that there is an anomaly. IT teams get these alerts on their monitoring dashboard via emails or enterprise collaboration tools such as Slack or Teams. Service level agreements expect IT teams to analyze every alert within a specific timeframe and take appropriate action.

Alerts are indispensable to any IT operations system today. Site reliability engineers (SREs) or ITOps executives set up several monitoring tools for their IT landscape. When there is a change, high-risk action, or outage in any of these incidents, the monitoring tool triggers an automated alert. This could happen on the monitoring tool’s dashboard itself, via email, or enterprise collaboration tools like Slack or Teams.

The most effective way to understand an incident, resolve it and prevent it from occurring again is root-cause analysis. Simply put, root-cause analysis is the study performed by ITOps teams or site reliability engineers (SREs) to pinpoint the exact element/error that caused the unexpected behavior. Based on this, they plan remediation. Accurate and timely root-cause analysis can have a direct impact on the company’s top and bottom line.

AIOps as a function is steadily gaining popularity, even climbing the Gartner Hype Cycle. Today’s observability tools go beyond merely monitoring to perform proactive remediation of events and incidents. However, what many of them lack is context. For instance, consider a regular AIOps solution that identifies an anomaly in system behavior. It will raise an alarm and a remediation workflow will do its job.