AIOps’ importance in the ITSM/ITOM space grows daily, as it makes a significant impact in improving service assurance. It continues to develop its growth and influence on the IT Operations Management market, with a projected market size to be around $2.1 billion by 2025, according to Gartner. As organizations increasingly take interest in incorporating AIOps in their IT operations, it’s worth understanding the various ways AIOps improve service assurance. But first, let’s take a look at what AIOps and service assurance involve.
What is AIOps?
AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) is the application of machine learning and other AI techniques to the management of IT operations. This can include tasks such as monitoring, incident response, and problem resolution. Some of the key objectives of AIOps are to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and minimize human error in IT operations.
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Service assurance is a set of processes that are used to ensure that IT services are delivered to customers in a consistent, reliable, and predictable manner. This can include monitoring and measuring the performance of IT services, identifying and resolving issues that may impact service delivery, and implementing service level agreements (SLAs) to ensure that service quality standards are met.
4 ways AIOps improve service assurance
With the definitions explained, what are the different ways that AIOps help improves service assurance?
1. Identifies problems quickly
Manually checking if things are working as they should is not only a huge time drain but you also risk missing key events or information that can cause issues later.
With AIOps, you can carry out automated performance monitoring, as well as receive automatic alerts should an issue arise. This means if a problem within your services or a risk crops up, they’re flagged up immediately, enabling you to investigate and resolve them before they cause a bigger disruption. And in some cases, you can even set up automated incident and problem resolution processes, meaning that any issues can be resolved without you having to lift a finger. This saves a lot of time for the IT operations team, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks that enhance service delivery and quality.
2. Enables effective change management
Having a good change management process is important in maintaining high service assurance. AIOps helps with this.
By automating many of the tasks involved in identifying, assessing, and implementing changes in IT systems, applying changes across the organization becomes simpler and more efficient. This includes monitoring systems for anomalies, analyzing log data, and identifying potential issues before they cause problems. Additionally, AIOps can help to optimize change management by providing insights and recommendations for changes that are likely to improve system performance.
3. Reduces downtime
Not many people appreciate when service is running as intended, but certainly, when downtime happens, it doesn’t go unnoticed.
By proactively identifying and addressing issues, AIOps can help to reduce the likelihood of downtime caused by system failures or other problems. And in the case that there’s a service outage, AIOps can help to minimize its impact by providing automated response capabilities, such as triggering backups or failover procedures.
4. Creates seamless end-user experience
AIOps capabilities enable organizations to achieve high service availability. With minimal disruptions, users can have a seamless service experience.
In addition, automated data collection and reporting functionalities make it possible to get an insight into the overall user experience. What issues are they coming across? Which channels are they coming from? These small details of the end-user journey that are gathered automatically can provide actionable insights to further enhance the end-user experience.
AIOps challenges
Now that we covered how AIOps helps improve service assurance, we know it’s well and good. But successful incorporation into the IT operations process is easier said than done. Fully extracting the benefits of AIOps has its challenges.
1. Lack of expertise
Overall, there is already a significant skills gap in IT, and expertise in AIOps is highly sought after. There’s a huge competition for IT professionals that possess this knowledge and not all organizations have the resources to attract these IT talents.
Growing the talent and skills within the organization is another viable option, but as businesses are often under a time constraint, it’s not the most ideal if they want to develop their AIOps capabilities quickly.
2. Specialized infrastructure
Due to AIOps’ complex nature, it requires specialized infrastructure that may not be the most feasible for some companies. Setting these up can take a significant amount of time, as well as money, prolonging time to value.
IT operations teams can often be bogged down with other time-sensitive activities, thus it’s all too easy to resort to quick fixes or short-term solutions, taking time away from building more sustainable systems.
3. Overwhelming amount of data
AIOps help gathers information more efficiently, but there can be something as too much. Not all data is good data. It can be overwhelming to filter through the noise and find the metrics that matter. Without set objectives and guides on how to measure success, you can be sitting on a lot of valuable information that can greatly equip you in improving service assurance.
SOURCE: Sami Musleh (2023 January 18) How AIOps improve service assurance. IFS Blog. https://blog.ifs.com/2023/01/how-aiops-improve-service-assurance
