Getting proper coverage for AIOps

To get the full benefits of AIOps, companies need to bring as many systems as possible under its umbrella, given that a problem in one part of the environment can have cascading effects somewhere else. A network problem might actually be a cybersecurity issue, or a user experience problem could be caused by a slow database server.

“As more companies migrate to digital, there are more interdependencies in applications,” says Machado. “If an application is underperforming, it’s likely to cause issues in other systems.”

But there are many obstacles to getting there. One is the cost of such a system. Another is the integration challenge of getting all the relevant data sources to work together. And there are organizational aspects that need to be addressed, says Machado. “Ultimately, your organizational fragmentation dictates your tool fragmentation.”

And it’s not just IT silos, he adds. AIOps needs inputs from other areas of the business to be effective. For example, if a company has a big product launch or a new marketing campaign or offers a large discount it could cause a spike in calls to a data center or traffic to a website and crash the system.

“You need to connect not just the application performance and server performance but events coming from the business side,” he says.

“The most successful AIOps implementations that we’ve seen have multi-departmental use cases,” agrees Will McKeon-White, an analyst at Forrester Research. Not just IT-related ones, like cybersecurity, but connections outside IT, such as to marketing, he says.

An AIOps system that collects real-time user monitoring data can become a shared business service, McKeon-White says, not just something that helps automate IT. “Those are the most successful use cases that we’ve seen.”