Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Modern hybrid-IT environments are monitored by numerous multi-vendor and multi-domain monitoring tools that generate humongous amounts of alerts and events, most of which are not readily actionable. The Industry term for this is “Alert Noise”. Noisy alerts increase the risk of real alerts going undetected causing service outages. These alerts also carry siloed information missing the application or service context.

The sudden shift to remote work caused by the global pandemic has forced IT Ops pros to quickly adjust in multiple ways to maintain the uptime and stability of critical digital services. Amidst this crisis, AIOps has emerged as a lifeline, as it facilitates remote collaboration, streamlines incident management, and accelerates detection and resolution.

Donnie Berkholz is a VP of IT Service Delivery and comments frequently on trends in IT infrastructure in his newsletter. We talked to Donnie about his typical day on the job, his initiatives in self-service platforms and product management and his take on top infrastructure management trends such as AIOps and Kubernetes.

In today’s digital world, a business’ success is inextricably tied to its ability to meet customer demands and rising expectations for quality, performance, responsiveness, and innovation. Digital transformation is no longer an optional add-on to help an organization stand out in a saturated market. It is a necessity for businesses hoping to keep up with fierce competition.

While the COVID-19 pandemic reshapes work processes, digitalization is allowing businesses to adjust to the fluid situation. The deployment of AI in IT operations is a good case study of this. Human beings’ social dimension needs cultivation. Otherwise, people become unhappy and perform ineffectively. Beyond that, many tasks require social interaction to be executed successfully, including in IT operations.

The idea of applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to more rapidly and accurately resolve IT incidents and manage alerts has been gaining steam in the past year. While AIOps, as it’s frequently called, has spawned an entirely new market of startups, many enterprise IT leaders are playing a cautious hand so far – and for good reason. There are risks, though. If an AIOps tool goes wrong out of the gates, IT and executive trust diminishes.

Major changes are redefining how IT operations monitoring is done, and impacting tooling, processes and skills. But how exactly can IT Ops leaders ensure continuous service assurance of their critical digital services now and in the future? What’s the key to having the required visibility and control over these modern and complex IT environments that are increasingly hybrid, distributed, dynamic and modular?

AI Ops is about enabling developers, program managers, service engineers, website reliability engineers etc. to efficiently build as well as run online services or applications at scale with AI & ML techniques. AI Ops is expected to help improve service quality. customer satisfaction, enhance technology productivity, and reduce cost. With hype all around the world regarding artificial intelligence, IT leaders are sceptical whether it will actually be useful to them or will it add to their costs.