This is the first in a three-post series themed around Ops-led DevOps, where I’ll explore the relationship between observability and a set of software delivery lifecycle practices that support the adoption of DevOps practices and the transition from project to product-centric ways of working. I’ll start with Site Reliability Engineering, move onto Value Stream Management and finish with Continuous Delivery.

There’s next to nothing in the world that hasn’t been impacted by COVID-19. We’ve now reached the stage of the pandemic where we’re evaluating the effect on every part of our lives. Over the last few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time speaking with IT leaders and reflecting on how the business technology landscape has been shifting.

Alert noise is reaching an all-time high in IT organizations. The volume of these alerts from disparate tools and technologies has reached a point where they are greatly undermining the ability of IT organizations to properly manage, secure and optimize services and applications for users and customers. DEJ’s recent study on AIOps found that organizations currently spend $1.27 million annually on avoidable incident escalations that result from non-contextual and non-actionable alerts.

The movies are filthy with examples of artificial intelligence. Some, like the first Terminator, are evil. Some, like the Star Wars droids, work for the good guys. And so many of them are flatly iconic—Blade Runner (both of them), 2001: A Space Odyssey, War Games, Westworld (the movie and the HBO series), Matrix[i] … the list keeps going and going. We aren’t at the point yet when we can get R2 to talk the Millennium Falcon—or the data center—and find out what’s wrong.

When it comes to “business as usual,” the workflow of IT teams today likely looks quite different than it did even a few months ago. Because of this, being able to adapt and put new safeguards in place that ensure uninterrupted business operations is more important than ever. In fact, it’s a necessity.