Getting Started With
AIOps
Table of
Contents
Getting Started with AIOps 01
What is AIOps? 02
What is ITSM? 03
Implementing APM Solutions 04
Analyzing with IT Operations Analytics tools 06
(ITOA) And SecOps
AIOps in DevOps 08
Tools you can use for AIOps 09
Job Description for an AIOps Expert 10
Implementing AIOps in your Organization 11
Getting Started with AIOps
In the production environment, machine learning It helps to have AI/ML for several reasons. These
and AIOps are the new big things to talk about. include:
They’re the latest trend for artificial intelligence,
another way to build intelligent applications, and Human, physical, and social activities are
often more hype than substance. becoming more complex as society changes.
AIOps is an emerging software method that Scalability is required to handle spikes in the
attempts to reduce the complexity of software
number of moves required in response to
failures. It focuses on three fundamental
user needs.
principles:
Layers of a system need to be optimized
Problem Discovery. AIOps takes in a
so their work can be done in parallel with
problem you see, analyzes it, and presents
one another, potentially with larger volumes
you with solutions.
of data.
Task Prediction. When a problem occurs, To make these efficiencies, application owners
AIOps will create a solution to that problem. need to optimize workflows to process data
with intelligent analysis to allow insight into the
Task Execution. Once you’ve created a system.
solution, the solution is put to work. AIOps
takes care of the execution of the solution. I’ve seen several digital transformation cases
where a business had previously done data
According to data provided by ISVs, 57 percent analytics rigidly and traditionally. Then, along
of organizations use machine learning, and 86 came machine learning. Now the data analysts
percent use artificial intelligence to improve and system administrators are sitting on the
business outcomes. Why? Because AI and ML other side, advising businesses on optimizing
have fundamentally changed how organizations their systems. The engineers are giving it a try.
have had to look at their machines, applications,
and data, and forced them to rethink how they You also need AI and ML to understand user
operate. and customer needs to build software that
understands what customers want and the
need to move more quickly to develop and
deliver that software.
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What is AIOps?
There’s a lot of hype about the term AIOps. It’s Let’s talk about what’s going on here. It turns
pretty common to hear it talked about as “AI for out that Google didn’t fully understand what
IT.” Unfortunately, most of the people discussing the project was supposed to be solving. Google
the word don’t understand what it means. had tasked it with finding all of the orders that
They don’t have a solid understanding of the the Google customer’s site received for their
underlying philosophy of what AIOps is trying product.
to accomplish, and as a result, they don’t fully
realize its power. You can be sure that a machine-learning system
is not going to know this. What it’s going to do
To put it another way, they’re talking about is spit out a giant list of every order that was
software, and, as we all know, software can placed for all of the products in the store. This
be very complicated. This particular kind of brute-force approach is a way of analyzing data,
software often relies on machine learning and but it’s not a way to provide robust solutions to
deep learning, and as a result, it’s very detailed. problems.
If you do have some experience with machine Since this problem is unique to this particular
learning, you’ll know that this kind of software AIOps software system’s specific use case, it
will be a much more significant challenge than doesn’t apply to the industry.
any algorithm or AI/ML service that you’ve ever
built in the past. For example, recently, Google
made a huge mistake in its production AIOps
service, and as a result, many AIOps software
systems crashed, and many users were without
service.
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What is ITSM?
IT Service Management (ITSM) is a broad term If you handle IT on your own, is your current
for the solutions, processes, and practices IT service delivery business compliant with ISO/IEC
professionals use to monitor, measure, and 20000?
manage IT environments to ensure the health,
availability, and utilization of business services. Your answer to this question tells you if you are
These services are governed using proactive doing service delivery right. If your company
service level agreement (SLA) metrics, quality has not worked towards compliance, it is time
of service (QoS), and total cost of ownership to review your business and seek a professional
(TCO). While IT teams currently manage IT ITSM service provider equipped to bring your
environments by performing manual tasks and business in the 21st century. If your company
putting off necessary improvements, ITSM is the is compliant, you need to invest in professional
practice of continuously evolving a process to ITSM service delivery. IT Service Management
monitor the environment and make on-demand can provide you with solutions that will bring the
improvements. best out of your business. The top-notch ITSM
service delivery approach helps your company
IT Service Management (ITSM) dictates the maximize your people’s efficiency, resources,
design and application of the processes and and technology.
policies needed to deliver quality IT services. It
includes service management tools that track, Can you find a solution that works with your
measure, review, and repair service delivery. current service delivery approach?
ITSM is supported by various standards and
codes and aligns with enterprise goals. Do you have the budget for hiring a service
management provider?
IT Service Management is where outsourcing
works. There is a need to blend legacy systems Most likely, you don’t. That is why IT service
and IT with core business processes and management is a business competency, meaning
automation. ITSM solutions are the answer. that it doesn’t just bring value to your customers,
but also your business. If you are looking for a
ITSM is the method by which IT is managed. solution that works with your current service
ITSM is a useful tool for managing IT service delivery approach, IT service management is
delivery. This business competency delivers just the solution you need. You will get the right
value by understanding customer needs and value for money.
translating that into IT service delivery.
The following questions will help you determine
whether ITSM is for you.
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Implementing APM
Solutions
Business agility and service delivery are still app is launched in a different container, with
paramount as critical goals for enterprises. While any existing containers in an older version
technology innovations are taking place across discarded. That creates a significant burden on
multiple domains and industries, applications IT as they need to regenerate the number and
play a crucial role in business operations. The types of containers they need to support an
application-centric nature of businesses and the application. These are particularly challenging
enterprise’s digitalization have pushed the IT issues for continuous delivery and application
functions to think, act, and execute through an development, where it is critical to keep the
application lens. application updated and always available to the
user base.
APM vendors have recognized the cloud’s
potential as the premier delivery platform for The cost of containers, and container
applications that allow IT and business units management, in general, has become a
to rapidly implement new applications, new significant concern for the large organizations
scenarios, and new ways of interacting with that adopt them as part of their strategy
customers. That is especially true for the rapidly for agility and delivery. While container
emerging cloud-native model of apps, which management is, of course, not a binary issue —
frequently employ distributed computing and any organization can choose to continue to use
microservices architectures. APM solutions for a traditional container management model to
cloud-native apps are becoming more relevant achieve the agility benefits and manageability
as they evolve and extend across various that containers offer — APM technology is often
deployment models, varying technologies, and leveraged to support a particular environment
data stores. and ensure compliance with regulatory
requirements and various company policies. As
Cloud-native applications use microservices to a result, APM solution vendors focus their efforts
deliver business agility, reduce the need for unit on streamlining these processes and offering
testing, and support flexible deployment models. easy-to-use integration capabilities and services.
As a result, they frequently rely on containers,
which allow them to be moved quickly and The rise of cloud-native apps is forcing IT
rapidly between containers and various clouds to consider an application’s entire life cycle
and other distributed environments. Containers and its extended life cycle across a range of
also enable apps to be scaled dynamically technologies. In most cases, they will require a
without incurring the cost of hardware and broad set of APM capabilities from start to finish.
associated bandwidth in a public cloud Some use cases might include:
environment. Typically, a new or expanding
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Application Architecture: integration and In this modern age of app delivery, the role
monitoring of database, storage, cloud, and of APM vendors is changing. These vendors
increasingly focus on simplifying these
network resources, in addition to tracing
complicated solutions by providing solutions that
and alerting of events that impact these
can enable DevOps and software management
resources as a service (SaaS) in an environment that
supports containers and microservices, where
Application Deployment: configuration,
both software and underlying hardware can be
upgrade, upgrade policy, patching, and deployed in the cloud.
installation of apps, upgrades and rollbacks,
monitoring and analysis of performance, As with many other cloud-native technologies,
health, and security, etc. cloud-native APM solutions integrate
containerized APM features directly into these
Performance Monitoring and Analysis: platforms. These solutions are more efficient
tuning and analysis of applications and and comfortable to implement in a cloud
environment due to their lighter footprints and
data with a focus on end-user experience
easier management. Also,
and performance, including correlating
cloud-native APM can be deployed on-premises
application analytics and application or off-premises and managed with leading APM
performance measurements with business software solutions.
metrics and KPIs
Performance Management: communication
and reporting of problems and
improvements to developers and teams,
troubleshooting and root cause analysis,
identifying bottlenecks, and highlighting and
prioritizing changes or improvements
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Analyzing with IT
Operations Analytics tools
(ITOA) And SecOps
Cloud infrastructure support is a critical component in SecOps in the same way it is for IT Operations.
Organizations can use the opportunity to step back from operations and view how things are going
with infrastructure.
That may include alerting on outliers or continuous monitoring of metrics. As you look to have a
balanced view of your assets, it is crucial to identify where they are most likely to be exposed or
vulnerable to attacks. For example, infrastructure that hosts Amazon Web Services is much more
exposed to attacks than the private network, although both have very similar security defenses.
If you are assessing your networks and infrastructure, then security is also essential. If your data
center is primarily in-house, you will look at the back office systems as they will directly impact your
ability to make money. Having the ability to see what those back-office systems are doing will enable
you to alert on anomalies.
IT always wants to know what’s happening in the cluster. That’s why so many organizations now use
cloud-based monitoring and alerting services, such as AWS SNS, AWS CloudWatch, AWS EMR, and
Greengrass, as central components to their infrastructure.
As the need for continuous monitoring, alerting, and analytics on the cloud is growing, so is the
complexity. All the leading cloud providers have various offerings, depending on many factors,
including:
Which functions a company needs, such as security or analytics, and whether it’s only supporting
a few cloud providers or all the major cloud providers
Whether the organization needs real-time alerts or whether it needs those alerts to be sent out at
a specific time
Whether alerts need to be sent via email or whether they’re best delivered via an interface
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Each solution has a different set of features and tools that it provides, so it’s essential to evaluate all
of the solutions and determine which features, tools, and monitoring mechanisms are best suited for
your business. Some options are less important, such as providing alerts via email or a web interface.
Other devices, such as SNS, are critical to a monitoring strategy.
Here are a few tips on how to evaluate the various monitoring tools available on the market:
Evaluate cloud service providers to determine which service provides you with the feature(s) you
need
Consider the cloud service providers’ security and scalability capabilities and their monitoring and
alerting tools.
Evaluate alerting engines and integration with other cloud platforms
Consider how much attention the providers will give to ensuring your implementation is working
as expected.
Evaluate vendors’ pricing, and look for vendors that provide a reasonable price, especially considering
that many are subscription-based. Also, look for pricing that’s well below the competition to avoid a
lack of competitive pricing.
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AIOps in DevOps
As we’ve seen throughout the past couple of Over the past year, organizations have begun
decades, the software delivery process is never to embrace and adopt an AIOps methodology
finished. It continually evolves, and organizations to keep pace with software release cycles.
have to develop with it frequently. Adopting the This AIOps approach focuses on giving the
continuous delivery approach is an essential first development teams the ability to improve
step to moving the pipeline forward. However, software delivery efficiency, enabling a more
there is still plenty of work that needs to be done continuous delivery approach that can meet the
as we move into the future. One of the significant needs of today’s modern software pipelines.
challenges you must address is monitoring and
managing the software delivery process. The benefits of an AIOps approach in driving
continuous delivery for software teams are
The fact that software is a continually evolving clear. It gives them the ability to respond to the
ecosystem brings another challenge. Software development team’s needs as they scale and
systems continuously change, so the tools used move into a continuous delivery environment
to monitor them must also develop. Today’s and provide rapid responses and operational
software monitoring solutions have to watch insight to ensure the highest quality software
the cloud, Linux, container technologies, and product for today’s global organizations. While
microservices effectively. It’s a challenge to make a great deal of effort has gone into the initial
these tools ready for the next wave of software AIOps offerings in this space, it remains the core
delivery. of the problem to solve today’s issue.
As developers move into a continuous delivery While it remains true that monitoring the
approach, the ability to monitor and intervene software delivery pipeline is critical for
in a high-performing delivery pipeline becomes organizations to make sure that they’re
crucial. And while changes to the software meeting the needs of their development teams,
delivery process are occurring, having a system organizations should also ensure they are also
in place to intervene in real-time, the software managing the software quality and delivery
monitoring problem becomes more of an issue. process. To that end, many different aspects
Today’s software monitoring does not have come into play that organizations need to
the automated capabilities needed to provide consider.
guidance and intervention that enables these
rapid response functions. The challenge for organizations is to ensure
that they have the right tools and the right skill
set within their organizations to continuously
monitor and adjust the software delivery
process.
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Tools you can use for AIOps
There are some tools out there that will simplify useful tool for unifying infrastructure metrics,
your job. Although this list is somewhat system health, and application metrics. Once
incomplete, here are a few that we have found integrated into the software orchestration,
are valuable to a functional AIOps engineer.
AIOps platform, you can then monitor critical
and high-risk metrics across all infrastructure
Apigee: Apigee is a collection of APIs that
components in one place.
allow you to create applications that use
HTTP/S-API. With Apigee, you can build your ServiceNow: The ServiceNow platform
own “AIOps function,” which will allow your can manage most of the non-IT related
application to build a query to identify the requirements, like, appointment scheduling,
problem in your environment and execute an payroll, etc. The platform also comes with
AIOps action to fix that problem. integrated performance management,
security, user and location tracking, social
Apache Exoscale: Apache Exoscale is a
media, and mobile device management
customer data platform that allows you to
tools.
collect, store, and analyze your customer
data. The platform can collect data from any Splunk: Splunk provides analytics for nearly
source, including multiple sources (text, web, every important facet of your company.
etc.) or all of your systems (CSV, CSV-O, From finance to marketing, from IT to HR.
SQLS, Excel, etc.). Data can be displayed as dashboards and
graphs to help pinpoint issues and make
Doyle: Doyle is a product of Loggly, a
faster decisions. Splunk provides the ability
search and discovery service based in San
to communicate data by specific employees,
Francisco. It can read CSV files, perform
specific divisions, or even particular projects.
sentiment analysis, and logs events,
making it a useful tool in a full-stack AIOps OpsGenie: OpsGenie is an IT Ops tool that
environment. is often paired with Incident Management
systems. If you already have one of these,
DynaTrace: DynaTrace can build a dynamic
pairing it with AIOps is a considerable
score for any given enterprise application
benefit because AIOps tools can monitor
across time, the vendor, platform, and
and fix problems autonomously without
configuration settings. It’s an incredibly
touching humans.
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Job Description for an
AIOps Expert
The most significant difference between AIOps As an AIOps engineer, you will not be the
and, say, an average developer is that an AIOps only person responsible for performance
engineer will know much more about the improvements. You will be the only person
underlying data and a good deal more about responsible for getting the required functionality
how it’s being consumed and processed than to play your environment’s other parts.
a typical developer does. That’s why they’ll be
called on to build and maintain a wide variety of For example, when you use Exoscale, you will
software tools and user interfaces. Still, AIOps need to run two servers in a partitioned network.
also uses many enterprise tools like Kafka, Kafka You can do this by configuring each server
Connect, Kinesis, etc. with its firewall and load balancer. However,
you will need to manage the distributed
You can expect to complete the following tasks: computing resource, deploy instances to run
your applications, and monitor these instances to
Design, test, and validate complex make sure they are correctly running.
continuous monitoring and capacity
orchestration processes
Build and monitor complex distributed
systems using monitoring techniques that
gather dynamic data from systems and
ingest this data to an application server
Leverage data analysis techniques to drill
down into the system to diagnose issues,
discover cause-and-effect patterns, and
model new methodologies to address
vulnerabilities, capacity issues, and
performance issues
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Implementing AIOps in
your Organization
While AIOps is undoubtedly a new way of looking at managing IT infrastructure, and not always
something in place for all enterprises, there is little doubt that it’s worth considering if you’re at the
beginning of a significant software project.
AIOps has become so widespread that almost every industry is now beginning to benefit from health
care to education. The evidence shows that AIOps can help you build better products, maintain better
services, and run IT more efficiently, but for now, it’s an IT discipline that’s still in its infancy.
In this case, like any new IT discipline, it’s essential to consider potential pitfalls and issues as part of
an investment in IT and take an objective approach to how you develop your strategy.
When in doubt, take the time to develop a plan that you can follow through to ensure that your AIOps
efforts are productive and are implemented in the most effective manner possible.
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