AIOps continues to be written about by pundits as the next “big” thing in IT, yet as with so many technology research projects, it has yet to deliver even a fraction of the promised utopia. The premise is good at a high level, but does it really address the core challenges you have today and for the foreseeable future? How can you get in front of infrastructure operations with the needed agility now, and not get stuck with just an empty promise of AI?
Drop it in and it will find and resolve your IT operations problems. Yet, as with a lot of other trends, the story breaks down when viewed against today’s reality. Sure, the premise seems good, but is it really addressing the challenge we have today?
Can AIOps solve your business case today? AIOps is intended to focus on orchestrating all resources, not just networks. The promise is elastic capacity based upon demand. The issue with AIOps is shooting far beyond what is a reality today, and current technologies tend to be vendor-specific or extremely limited in delivered results. In addition, the promise that AIOps will automatically learn what needs to be done and just execute those changes is flawed.
Today’s reality is a challenge of scale, not knowledge. AIOps promises to ARTIFICIALLY CREATE operational KNOWLEDGE, but in fact and as most IT leaders would agree, we already have the subject matter experts that can address nearly every operational problem at hand. The issue today is in fact one of scale, how to scale those subject matter experts to make their knowledge and expertise executable globally by the rest of their teams.
Making matter worse, IT is at an inflection point. The once prevalent wealth of network engineers have been slowly drying up. There’s no guarantee that your engineer with the undocumented tribal network knowledge will still be here tomorrow.
And, businesses aren’t slowing down in their use of network infrastructures, if anything they are rapidly expanding and going to the cloud for additional capacity. So, the knowledge contained within these subject matter experts are a precious commodity that needs to be captured and made available throughout the organization as soon as possible.
AIOps is shooting at the wrong target today. It ignores the vast amount of knowledge and experience that currently resides inside every enterprise and promises to replace that with its own processes. Common sense says that cannot be better that the proven processes created by subject matter experts. By ignoring the SMEs, AIOps is designed to start with a blank canvas. By focusing on “AI”, the INDUSTRY is simple addressing the wrong problem. Worth a reminder are the thousands of failed ai projects seen for the past 20 years and the associated huge investments and long dev cycles with little or nothing to show for them.
According to Gartner, I&O leaders responsible for infrastructure, operations and cloud management should: “Focus on tangible and incremental business outcomes with quantitative value-based proof points. Avoid the AIOps hype.” that said, automation of existing knowledge and best practices is the state-of-the-art and can be executed at the speed of the machine and at scale today- with the almost guaranteed results which are so desperately needed today.
Gartner® Gartner, “Market Guide for AIOps Platforms”, Pankaj Prasad, Padraig Byrne, Gregg Siegfried, 30 May 2022. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
AIOps platforms have existed for a number of years, yet successful deployments require time and effort. The time to any value of many AIOps platform tool deployments is measured in months or years, and usually delivers far less than was previously expected, which has led to dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the market segment.
Gartner® Gartner, “Market Guide for AIOps Platforms”, Pankaj Prasad, Padraig Byrne, Gregg Siegfried, 30 May 2022. Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Organizations that have attempted AIOps will consider their pilot projects as research only. So, while the promise of smarter operations usually starts with a discussion of “AI”, in fact a more successful and proven approach is to focus on automating the operations knowledge we already have access to, since that is a universally accepted resource already in place today.
Today’s focus on “Automation” rather than “AI” is the smarter approach being sought so widely today. Successful automation is possible because NetOps already has the knowledge, the real problem continues to be how to harness and scale it.
For network operations, automation at scale of existing NetOps knowledge and best practices yields significant tangible and measurable operational results. It starts with a smart platform that has full real-time visibility of the entire network, with all the performance and configuration detail needed for every network component and their context. Upon that foundation, the ability to capture and share problem-solving expertise and subject matter expert knowledge makes operational automation a reality.
Operational scale and efficiency are the topics de jour and NetOps is being forced to innovate. They no longer have the luxury of simply adding more resources to scale, so these organizations are turning to proven automation approaches to strategically support their operational needs.
While automation is the transformation answer for NetOps, many IT professionals have limited their understanding of automation for NetOps to the Day-0 and Day-1 scenarios. Essentially getting new equipment up and running. They have however overlooked the long-term and significantly more impactful value of Day-2 operations…. keeping the infrastructure running as the business needs it to be running. The value of Day-2 automation cannot be overstated enough since it dwarfs the combined value of Day-0 and Day-1 automation by a factor of 100 or more.
Day-2 operations are centered on delivering the value of IT services over the lifespan of the infrastructure. The network’s business needs vary from service to service and application to application, so Day-2 operational focus allows organizations to be assured that all these business needs are continuously being met. And due to the resulting and lengthy list of all these needs when scaled, automation becomes the perfect platform to make this possible without the traditional overhead associated with hiring additional operators and engineers.
As you look towards what’s next in 2023, we can help you explore smarter ways to address your existing problems at scale, without the commensurate need to hire vast numbers of subject matter experts around the globe, and even get in front of the operational challenge to prevent problems from occurring in the first place. Once an automation platform has been deployed for NetOps, it can proactively look for minor problems before they manifest into production.