The current days of remote work and “IT Ops from home” may or may not be here to stay, but they definitely reinforce the need for consolidating and modernizing our monitoring. The challenges which multiple siloed tools create for understanding the big picture are only exacerbated by having just one screen to look at when monitoring our IT from our kitchen table.
When I read Greg Ferro’s infamous “Why I hate ITIL so much” blog back in 2015, I have to admit that I agreed with many (albeit not all) of what he said. Maybe it’s the issues that I have with authority in general, or maybe it’s my many years of working within the constraints of ITIL and ITSM in operating systems and services – but I truly believed (and still do) that well-educated, experience and consensus-based pragmatism is what actually gets things done.
As a former NOC engineer, I clearly remember my onboarding, and especially the deep-rooted fear I felt every time I encountered an alert that was new to me – particularly during a night shift. My only consolation was that I was never alone during training, so there was always someone I could ask that very awkward question: “I’m new here, what do we do with this…?”
In the past, many organizations grew and managed their own data centers. Some still do. And many are still developing their own automated incident management (aka Autonomous Operations) tools. But as IT grows and becomes evermore complex and fast-moving, the reality of what it means to do so kicks in, and organizations are re-evaluating their strategies.
Since the term ‘AIOps’ came into use in the monitoring sector a couple of years ago, there has been much confusion about what it means. We hear from users asking if they need it – a difficult question given that the answer depends on how you define it. Since there isn’t a broadly accepted definition, a range of vendors now market their products as AIOps offerings, even though these products cross subsectors and may not be directly competitive.
DevOps is fast, glamorous and agile. It is key to keeping modern, fast-moving IT environments up and running. And it is no stranger to automation: DevOps has been relying on automation for many years now to ensure the rapid delivery of applications in this ever-changing landscape. Yet even the most agile and advanced DevOps teams cannot escape the growing complexity, scale and pace of the modern IT stack.
The ever-growing complexity, scale and pace of IT environments puts a huge burden on IT Ops, NOC, and DevOps teams, who are tasked with keeping these environments up and running. One of the biggest challenges is Root Cause Analysis (RCA). When something breaks, they need to determine what broke it, and they need to do it fast.
My 2nd Gartner IOCS experience ended with a bang, just like my first one, with an amazing presentation by Jason Walker at Blizzard Entertainment (part of the $42B Activision-Blizzard gaming powerhouse) on how they use AIOps to deliver an amazing gaming experience for hundreds of millions of gamers around the world, 24×7. But before I get to that, let me share some more key takeaways from the conference.
Critical and sev1 incidents are always a priority, but what about those dozens and often hundreds of lower priority ones that often sit in a queue waiting for a first response engineer to get to them? Do you find that no matter how much effort your team puts into minimizing the number of queued incidents, their number always seems to grow? If this sounds familiar – this blog is for you.
