The Value of AIOps-Based Intelligent Remediation

There’s remediation, and then there’s intelligent remediation. Both types of remediation solutions, when performed properly, will solve whichever software performance or availability issue you are experiencing.

But only intelligent remediation, which depends on AIOps-driven automation, will resolve an issue quickly, efficiently, and with minimal burden on your IT team.

What Is Intelligent Remediation?

Intelligent remediation refers to an incident-resolution process that relies on data and Machine Learning to take automated action in response to a problem. It’s sometimes also called automated response.

Intelligent remediation is the opposite of manual remediation, which remains the default approach to incident resolution for most IT teams today. WIth manual remediation, you have to wait for human engineers to take manual action in response to an incident. With intelligent remediation, however, you gain several key advantages:

1. Incidents are resolved more quickly, leading to a better user experience.
2. Your IT team doesn’t have to perform manual actions to resolve an incident. As a result, your engineers’ time can be used more effectively.
3. In some cases, AIOps tools may be able to remediate an issue more effectively than a human engineer, because they have a greater level of visibility into a problem. An AIOps tool might remediate an issue by identifying and solving its root cause, for example, whereas a human engineer would not understand the root cause and would only implement a temporary fix.
4. AIOps tools can use past data to improve intelligent remediation processes over time. This means that intelligent remediation grows more effective the longer you have tools in place.

In each of these ways, AIOps-driven intelligent remediation tools lead to better results in less time and with less cost. In fact, intelligent remediation is the only way in many cases to manage today’s complex, highly dynamic environments. Relying on humans to take manual action may take too long, leading to a poor user experience. And in environments that are highly complex, human engineers may simply not be able to take effective action at all because they cannot make sense of all of the data and variables.

Intelligent Remediation vs. Intelligent Monitoring

It’s important to understand that intelligent remediation is different from AIOps-assisted monitoring.

Your engineers might use AIOps tools to help them monitor and interpret infrastructure and software problems. Such tools can help your engineers to gain deeper insight into complex environments than they could manage on their own.

However, unless those tools take the additional step of responding to incidents themselves, they provide only intelligent monitoring, not intelligent remediation. To achieve intelligent remediation, your tools must be able not only to make sense of complex environments without depending on manual assistance from human engineers but also take automated action based on what they learn.

Controlling Intelligent Remediation

If you’re a seasoned IT engineer, you may not be comfortable with letting robots totally assume responsibility for responding to incidents.

Fortunately, taking advantage of intelligent remediation does not mean surrendering complete control of your environments to AIOps tools. Your engineers can set policies to configure how the tools should behave in various scenarios, and set limits on what they can do.

For example, if you don’t want your AIOps tools to remediate problems on a certain server automatically, you can prevent them from doing so. Or you could configure thresholds that limit the amount of change that the tools can make automatically without receiving approval from a human engineer.

Controlling intelligent remediation features in these ways is useful for preventing unanticipated consequences, or ensuring that human engineers are able to review major changes before they are implemented.

Conclusion

As infrastructure and software environments grow more and more complex, intelligent remediation is becoming not just a nice-to-have feature, but a critical resource for helping IT teams to address problems quickly and effectively. Using the power of AIOps, intelligent remediation delivers a better user experience and saves your engineers’ time, without requiring your IT team to hand the reins over totally to AIOps bots.

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