Cloud platforms, managed service providers, and organizations undertaking digital transformations are beginning to reap the benefits of an emerging IT trend: the use of AI-powered IT operations technology to monitor and manage the IT portfolio automatically.
AIOps is an emerging IT practice that applies artificial intelligence to IT operations to help organizations intelligently manage infrastructure, networks, and applications for performance, resilience, capacity, uptime, and, in some cases, security. By shifting traditional, threshold-based alerts and manual processes to systems that take advantage of AI and machine learning, AIOps enables organizations to better monitor IT assets and anticipate negative incidents and impacts before they take hold.
Many AIOps platforms have been built on monitoring systems with a long history. Others began in AI labs and grew outwards. Good AIOps tools generate forward-looking guesses about machine load and then watch to see whether anything deviates from these estimates. Anomalies might be turned into alerts that generate emails, Slack posts, or, if the deviation is large enough, pager messages. Sophisticated AIOps tools also offer “root cause analysis,” which creates flowcharts to track how problems can ripple through the various machines in a modern enterprise application.