When you get down to it, Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) is about embracing emerging technology to improve IT Operations. The technology is new, powerful, and can do VERY impressive work. In its most basic form, AIOps represents technologies targeted at making IT Operations run as smoothly as possible. It is a new twist on a long-standing goal. That goal is to implement the best technology, automate whatever you can, and use intelligence (now artificial) to make your operations run faster so your businesses run more smoothly, and as a result your lives become easier. This resonates with me completely. The core of our ZSolutions business here at BMC focuses on helping clients transform the power of the mainframe and enhance their IT Operations day in and day out.
There is a broad spectrum of enterprise IT challenges that you can tackle with AIOps capabilities. Let us discuss a few:
Growing workload: Existing methods of managing IT infrastructure have fallen behind the needs created by the exponential workload growth on the mainframe and the unpredictable nature of digital business. Current IT Ops needs are already outside the scope of manual management and it will only get worse in the coming years. You must respond to infrastructure problems at lightning speeds, but complex systems and applications make that very difficult. The lack of holistic visibility into your mainframe systems and data affects your ability to respond adequately. As a result, your performance and availability can suffer and your costs increase.
Exponentially growing data: The amount of data that IT Ops needs to retain and manage is also increasing exponentially. This only exasperates the volume of information IT staff must monitor to protect, backup, optimize, etc. Performance monitoring is generating exponentially larger numbers of events and alerts. Service ticket volumes experience step-function increases with the introduction of IoT devices, APIs, mobile applications and digital/machine users. Again, it is simply becoming too complex for manual reporting and analysis.
Visibility and transparency of costs: With less predictability, increasing pace, and the number of new innovative services being rolled out, IT needs to monitor operations carefully to keep expenses low and predictable. That is almost impossible to do with manual processes. And with growing mainframe budget pressure, the challenge will only become worse. With intelligent automation, visualization, and monitoring, you can have an immediate impact without interrupting any operations or affecting your end-users.
What you need is a stronger foundation for AIOps. The framework on which to build and implement AIOps needs to include the best possible operational data on systems, databases, capacity and your cost drivers. You need to gather systems management data intelligently, and automatically correlate that data with intelligent analysis that can help avoid system-impacting events all together. What you need is integrated domain expertise along with enterprise-level alignment.
It is the start of a new year and I thought I would share my perspective on how what is old is new again. It is reassuring, actually. The monikers and technology may change, but the aspirations stay the same. I am personally gratified that AIOps gives a new focus to one of my core passions – streamlining IT operations and helping your businesses evolve.
Learn more about how BMC’s ZSolutions Business is advancing AIOps worldwide on our Mainframe Solutions pages. To read another BMC perspective on AIOps, see our What is AIOps blog from June 2017.
