ITOps teams are challenged today like never before, overwhelmed by IT noise and constantly fighting fires. And for the business this often means higher operating costs, performance and availability issues, and risks to enterprise digital initiatives. So what’s an IT Ops guy/gal gotta do? Well, lately there’s been talk about “a new sheriff in town” that claims to be able to solve this challenge, and its name is AIOps.
The definition for APM (Application Performance Management) has evolved greatly over the past years. It has moved from specifically referring to the monitoring of an application’s experience, its code and the timing of its different building blocks, to a broader term that is used for anything related to the performance of the app. It also often includes all the related monitoring, log management and more.
The underlying infrastructures behind IT systems have become complex and overloaded. A single incident in today’s IT stack can shut down large chunks of a business and cost it millions – or even billions. Because of that, many businesses consider implementing AIOps in their IT operations an important part of their future.
Transformation of IT Ops When I think of the term IT Ops I immediately think of Enterprise IT and the traditional attributes that make up this function – many of which are in the middle of an industry-wide disruption – and its associated impact. At LinkedIn, when we first looked at business process support, shadow IT and non-accounted-for IT spend, about 10 years ago, it was a bit of a revelation to me how the landscape had already changed by then.
I’m a big fan of historical TV dramas and last week I finished watching the stunning and shattering HBO TV miniseries about the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. As a monitoring expert and a product manager, I have visited dozens of IT operations centers, control rooms and NOCs, so I couldn’t help but compare them to the Chernobyl control room scenes in the show.
I hear it all the time when talking to future BigPanda customers; “I’m not sure BigPanda can really help me correlate all these alerts together because our CMDB is very immature.” Or sometimes, they don’t even have a CMDB, and incorrectly assume this disqualifies them from meaningful noise reduction and alert correlation. I’m happy to tell you the same thing I tell the folks who are looking at BigPanda for the first time. “No CMDB? No problem!”.
Usability and control are key elements in BigPanda’s Operations Console, where IT Ops, NOC and DevOps users investigate and take action on IT incidents. Let’s take a look at how BigPanda’s powerful Split Incident and Merge Incidents features provide IT Ops with an added layer of control. BigPanda’s Open Box Machine Learning correlates and enriches the overwhelming amount of alerts IT Ops needs to deal with into a reduced number of insight-rich incidents (often 95% fewer).
AppDynamics recently announced its new Integration Partner Program, and BigPanda is proud to be an inaugural member. The ten select members of the program have all strategically integrated with AppDynamics in support of its AIOps-focused vision, based on Cisco’s Central Nervous System for IT. We’ve been partnering with AppDynamics for quite some time now, and our inclusion in the partner program is both a natural evolution and an endorsement of our leadership in IT Operations and AIOps.
The Evolve Leadership and Technology Conference, hosted by our partner Trace3, saw over 1,300 IT execs gathering at Caesar’s Palace for two days of world-class keynotes and insights into the latest trends and technologies of the IT landscape.
A lot has been written about the ever-elusive “Single Pane of Glass” (or SPOG). From calling it a myth like BigFoot or The Loch Ness Monster , to reporting that “a centralized, service-centric view into IT environments has become a must-have capability for IT Operations” (2018 Digital Enterprise Journal Study), both opponents and proponents admit that the implementation of a centralized view into IT Ops is a real need, but at the same time, a major operational challenge.
