If you’re part of an IT Ops or NOC team, or if you manage one, you know that overwhelming IT noise is your #1 enemy. Not only does it flood your teams with false-positives, but it also buries critical root-cause events and it makes it hard to proactively detect expensive P1 and P0 outages.
As a Product Manager at BigPanda, I like to stay in touch with our customers on a regular basis. Recently, I visited a customer of ours in Atlanta. As I was getting got out of my rental car in the company’s parking lot, I noticed him pulling in into his small parking space in a very large pickup truck. “Those are some big wheels”, I commented.
It’s always great to get a shout-out from a customer, so I was thrilled to read a post on “Medium” written by our friends at Workday that talks about BigPanda! In the post, Owen Sullivan, Software Development Manager at Workday, discusses how Workday raised their availability SLA from an already industry-leading 99.5% to 99.7%, and how one of the key drivers they see for delivering on this promise is efficient monitoring.
Basically, Machine Learning by itself is dumb, whether its in cars or in ITOps. It needs context and intent to be beneficial. In IT Ops, that means that it requires business context to work properly.
Role-based access control (RBAC) has become one of the main methods for system access control within large enterprises, assigning access to users based on their role in the organization. Employees are allowed to access only those resources that are necessary to effectively perform their assigned job duties.
It’s time for change – my first insight from GartnerIO, 2018. During my flight to Vegas I remembered that this was probably my 15th visit to a conference in Vegas (but who can really count…after a few, it all starts to blur together). What I do remember though is that, in each of these conferences, there was one very shiny buzzword. The reason I remember this so well is because, while everyone agreed on what the buzzword was, there was no consensus on what that word meant!
Chronically understaffed and constantly stressed-out IT Ops and NOC teams are overwhelmed by today’s IT noise. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) can help these teams because ML (and AI) are exceptionally good at processing enormous volumes of very complex data in real-time, or near real-time, and surfacing actionable insights. But ML successes in IT Ops are still hit-or-miss.
You’ve just recovered from a critical application outage and your team is being asked to report on root cause and recommended remediation steps later this afternoon. Can you quickly analyze all the data, identify all the leading events, and discern which one was responsible for the cascading failure?
Rapidly increasing IT complexity, customer expectations around application availability and performance, and the importance of supporting new digital initiatives and services, taken together, are placing unprecedented demands on Network Operations Centers (NOCs) and IT Operations teams inside large, complex organizations like yours.
Offsite meetings can be great for getting things done. Being out of the office can clear the cobwebs, break down barriers, and lead to real breakthroughs. At BigPanda, the marketing team has started experimenting with how we run offsites, with the aim of trying to find a “secret sauce” that leads to success – maximizing both team building and task execution that we tackle in our offsites.
