Too Many Tools? Streamline Your Stack With AIOps

In today’s increasingly digital world, we have become more reliant on online applications and services. We depend on these technologies daily and expect them to function as intended whenever we access them. 

Because of this digital proliferation, IT leaders have prioritized continuous availability. Teams want to reduce downtime where possible because downtime leads to poor customer experience and negative reviews. As a result, potential customers have second thoughts, and established customers leave to pursue more available options.

Teams invest in monitoring tools to maintain business-critical uptime. However, multiple single-domain monitoring tools may begin to overwhelm teams as IT stacks grow more complex. The average team has 16 monitoring tools, and some have as many as 40, according to the Moogsoft State of Availability Report. 

This means IT teams have to monitor 16-40 separate tools simultaneously. All this tool surveillance is inconvenient and risky — the more tools to look after, the higher the likelihood of the team missing important information among all the noise. Additionally, monitoring takes up to 20% of a team’s time — time better dedicated to innovation and improvements. 

Even with the major time investment, teams still struggle with incident detection. Despite all the tools, customers are still the first to flag problems 45% of the time. So what’s the value of all the monitoring tools if they only catch issues about half the time? DevOps and SRE (site reliability engineering) teams need a more efficient monitoring approach that increases availability and optimizes the customer experience.

The Issue: Incomplete Information

Incident management point solution tools solve specific problems within the digital experience, IT infrastructure, application, or network. As the historical solution to monitoring, point solutions have perfected their piece of the availability puzzle. However, these solutions do not talk to one another, resulting in silos that obscure the big-picture view of the IT ecosystem. Point solution pitfalls include:

Cost and Inefficiency

With many tools come many licenses, and those expenses add up quickly. Also costly is the time engineers must spend babysitting the disparate monitoring tools and the data they generate. Research shows engineers spend more time supervising tools and “context-switching” than anything else, including engaging in productive, value-adding work.

Silos That Slow Progress

With so many monitoring tools to watch, information becomes lost within individual tools. Even if the information escapes its silo, engineers can miss important context when assembling the full view of the incident. These information gaps slow communication, delay mean time to recovery (MTTR), and extend downtime. 

Needless Noise

When teams work with multiple-point solutions, separate tools redundantly report interconnected issues. This overlapping information inflates the number of alerts the team must sift through to find the incident’s origin. In addition, extraneous noise and irrelevant alerts extend incident timelines and MTTR.

The Streamlined Solution: Tie Your Tools Together With AIOps

A plethora of monitoring tools means engineers need a way to thoughtfully connect them to see the forest (the entire IT ecosystem) for the trees (the individual point solutions). Domain-agnostic artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) links these tools and aggregates monitoring data. AIOps — the future of IT operations — combines automation with expert supervision of a single tool. 

With the ever-increasing amount of data tools generates, no one can manage all of it manually. AIOps can help increase uptime and availability by detecting anomalies before they escalate into an incident. AIOps alerts the human team and presents this information so they can fix the situation quickly. An integrated AIOps approach offers many advantages, including:

One Platform

AIOps centralizes the information from many monitoring tools to give a big-picture view of the entire system’s health. Instead of jumping between individual tools to gather data, an engineer gains a holistic view in a single dashboard. AIOps summarizes information so it’s understandable at a glance. When an incident occurs, AIOps automates the workflow to simplify incident response, thereby decreasing MTTR.

System Optimization

AIOps consolidates alerts from multiple monitoring tools, organizing and contextualizing information. This enriched data is more informative and actionable than the siloed data generated by point solutions. The system reduces noise, teams detect incident origins more quickly and MTTR decreases.

Incident Lifecycle Insight

AIOps implementation creates a singular place for engineers to engage with incidents and track them through their entire lifecycle. A single line of sight during the incident’s lifespan improves resolution efficiency and reduces downtime. 

AIOps Saves Time and Resources

Beyond just reducing downtime, AIOps can boost employee satisfaction by automating time-consuming and repetitive tasks. This automation reduces employee toil and frees them to work on interesting, fulfilling projects, and increases productivity, which leads to happier employees.

AIOps’ automation also reduces operational costs. Manually managing incidents is labor- and time-intensive, leading organizations to hire additional employees to try to keep up. AIOps automates workflows, improving efficiency so organizations can best manage their headcount.

So why isn’t everyone using AIOps? A common misconception is that new technology means significant change management, major spending, and complicated new processes. However, with the proliferation of software as a service (SaaS), AIOps implementation is remarkably less complicated and requires fewer resources than previous deployments in on-premise data centers, and its value is swiftly apparent. 

Further, AIOps for SaaS incorporate the myriad benefits inherent to SaaS products, such as scalability based on business needs and minimal ongoing maintenance. In addition, AIOps works with SaaS products, further increasing its value proposition for complicated IT environments.

In the ultra-competitive digital world, complicated IT environments can’t rely merely on numerous monitoring tools. Multiple tools create delays and downtime — and unhappy customers. AIOps solutions offer engineers a holistic view of the incident lifecycle, facilitate issue identification and resolution and ultimately lead to improved availability and better customer experience.