Contemporary digital infrastructure transcends the capabilities of traditional monitoring solutions. Today’s dynamic, ephemeral, and continuously evolving IT resources require monitoring tools that can cut through the noise, provide real-time data-driven insights, prioritize risks, and facilitate faster issue resolution.
AIOps sits at the junction of AI and IT operations—a field engineered to meet the velocity and scale of today's digital infrastructure.
AIOps-driven monitoring solutions can be transformative for enterprises, especially those undergoing rapid digital shifts and adopting a menagerie of cutting-edge tools. Market projections highlight the scale of AIOps adoption, with the industry anticipated to soar to $32.4 billion by 2028, a 22.7% annual growth rate.
This article breaks down how AIOps can benefit IT monitoring, analyzes the core components of an AIOps platform, and provides a comprehensive list of must-have features. Along the way, we’ll also touch on how Site24x7 modernizes IT monitoring via AIOps.
How AIOps can transform IT monitoring
Traditional monitoring tools were better suited for static environments with simpler architectures.
Achieving full visibility becomes increasingly challenging in distributed environments composed of hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructures and microservices setups, and traditional monitoring solutions often hit blind spots.
Visibility gaps, excessive low-risk alerts, and laggard incident response (IR) workflows are common byproducts of a suboptimal monitoring tool.
AIOps radically transforms traditional IT monitoring through automation and data-driven analytics. By linking past operational data with present-day system behavior, AIOps enables security teams to identify and address potential issues before they escalate.
Below are some of the advantages enterprises can unlock with an AIOps monitoring tool.
- Minimized downtime: AIOps proactively identifies and mitigates threats before they cause servers, websites, and applications to go offline. With AIOps, enterprises experience fewer service disruptions and downtime, the cost of which some reports estimate at $9,000 per minute.
- Quicker MTTD/MTTR: AIOps platforms ingest, correlate, and interpret diverse telemetry to expedite root cause detection, issue prioritization, and remediation. This accelerated mean-time-to-detection (MTTD) and mean-time-to-response (MTTR) helps reduce the impact of incidents and maintain uptime.
- Automated remediation: AIOps platforms can help teams set up automatic workflows to fix issues with minimal manual intervention. This expedites incident response processes and contributes to lower manual error rates.
- Optimized costs and resource expenditure: AIOps eradicates siloed tools, reduces downtime and disruptions, and streamlines incident response, all of which significantly cut operational costs. Businesses will also save money by avoiding data breaches and noncompliance incidents.
- Enhanced productivity and performance: AIOps automates routine tasks associated with monitoring, IR, and IT management. This enables teams to innovate and be strategic. Furthermore, by reducing disruptions, AIOps empowers enterprises to continuously operate at maximum efficiency.
- Improved resilience and reliability: AIOps leverages advanced ML algorithms to mine historical data and analyze real-time data to predict system failures and identify their root causes. Via continuous analysis, AIOps platforms proactively address weaknesses to ensure that IT systems are as robust and reliable as possible.
- Streamlined incident management: With the growing volume of incidents, companies need help managing security, compliance, and performance-related issues. AIOps cuts through the noise and accurately triages problems based on numerous contexts, both technical and business. Automated workflows also allow IR teams to focus on high-risk threats instead of suffering from alert fatigue.
- Better accountability and auditability: AIOps platforms log all events, activities, and remediation procedures. This high level of evidence collection and traceability helps with incident forensics and regulatory audits. Additionally, AIOps-powered traceability helps foster a culture of accountability because it ensures all IT teams are aligned.
Foundational components of an AIOps platform
The transformative capabilities of AIOps platforms can mitigate even the most complex monitoring challenges that enterprises face. But how do AIOps platforms achieve these benefits? To answer that question, we need to break down the core components of an AIOps platform.
Real-time telemetry processing
The most advanced AIOps IT monitoring capabilities stem from the ability to ingest, process, and analyze an enormous amount of heterogeneous data in real time. This includes logs, metrics, and event information from every branch of enterprise IT’s architecture—networks, applications, identities, and more.
This real-time data analysis ensures that AIOps platforms catch suboptimal performance or security issues before or as they occur—never after the fact.
Visualization and dashboards
The visualization capabilities of a monitoring solution should provide:
Noise reduction
With legacy tools, many teams have to sift through hundreds of low-risk alerts before finding issues that actually matter. Meanwhile, real threats may be causing significant damage.
Using advanced ML technologies, AIOps platforms correlate multiple risk factors and business contexts to eradicate noise and ensure that critical risks are always at the top of the list.
Anomaly detection
The best AIOps platforms ensure real-time detection of anomalies. AIOps tools can even identify the most minute deviations from baselines to catch suspicious behaviors before they fully manifest.
Constant ML-driven analysis ensures that real-time event data is analyzed against historical patterns to find anomalies, which could range from subtle fluctuations to massive spikes.
Most AIOps solutions come equipped with real-time analytics, intelligent issue triage, and anomaly detection. But how do you single out the crème de la crème of AIOps?
In the next section, we’ll detail several features a platform requires to make the cut.
AIOps-powered monitoring features to look out for
The following are some non-negotiable capabilities that your ideal AIOps platform needs to have. We’ll also explore how Site24x7 addresses these key AIOps-driven IT monitoring capabilities.
Data visualization
Real-time telemetry processing is a crucial aspect of AIOps. However, the best tools ensure that data is presented in highly interpretable and applicable ways.
Site24x7 visualizes information using charts, reports, and customizable dashboards. This ensures IT teams always have access to high-quality and usable data. This way, teams can immediately derive actionable insights from critical data.
Predictive analytics
Top AIOps platforms empower IT teams by providing comprehensive insights into performance fluctuations and security lapses before they occur. Highly advanced forecasting ensures optimized capacity planning, security measures, and maintenance procedures.
Site24x7 analyzes disk and memory space so that businesses are always prepared for future requirements. Since the platform proactively studies this data, businesses won’t ever experience server issues, scalability failures, or capacity-related shortfalls.
Real-time anomaly detection
Detecting suspicious events and behaviors as they happen is crucial in modern IT environments, given their dynamic nature. Missing any suspicious behavior by even minutes can result in a landslide of issues, eventually leading to downtime.
Site24x7’s anomaly detection capabilities include alerting teams to:
- Traffic spikes
- Slow web connections
- Inconsistent response times
- Numerous HTML or JavaScript errors
What makes Site24x7’s anomaly detection special is its use of matrix sketching algorithms and the Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) procedure.
Teams can also generate anomaly reports in CSV or PDF format, ensuring streamlined cross-team collaboration.
Intelligent alerting
Strong AIOps platforms identify when anomaly or performance thresholds are exceeded. However, the best tools ensure that this information reaches teams where they are.
Site24x7 not only detects suspicious activities in complex environments by allowing teams to establish both static thresholds and thresholds from Zia, Zoho’s AI-powered virtual assistant. It then passes along this information to teams via email, SMS, RSS feeds, instant messenger apps, and even voice alerts.
Setting up various groups and role-based alerts via the Site24x7 platform ensures that appropriate stakeholders are notified during events. Teams can also organize alerts by severity and set up persistent alerts to avoid critical issues from being overlooked.
Automation workflows
Not all threshold violations or events need in-depth interventions from IT teams. For certain issues, automated workflows will yield the most efficient mitigation strategy.
Site24x7 allows teams to script their own automated workflows, which the platform will then enforce at scale across servers, VMs, and EC2s. To make the process easy, Site24x7 lets teams script in a language of their choice, with options ranging from Ruby, Python, and Shell scripts to PowerShell and Bash scripts.
Assistive chatbots
AIOps platforms with integrated chatbots make IT monitoring a more accessible, interactive, and easily navigable experience.
Site24x7 features an NLP-based chatbot, which users can interact with using plain speech. They can input questions about various IT resources or monitoring metrics and receive instant responses. Site24x7 can even route these interactions via collaboration suites and apps such as Zoho Cliq and Microsoft Teams.
Incident response orchestration
In contemporary IT environments, incident response involves a collaborative and cohesive effort between teams, tools, and processes. Strong AIOps platforms ensure that these elements are never siloed—instead unifying and orchestrating them to ensure quick resolution.
Site24x7 prioritizes incidents based on business-criticality and offers maintenance windows for teams to collaborate and resolve problems fast. It also furnishes responders with detailed logs that reveal the underlying cause and severity of an incident.
Low data settings
It is a misconception that all AI-powered tools constantly need massive volumes of data to function effectively. Tools like Site24x7 can do more with less.
Even with minimal telemetry, Site24x7 can provide actionable IT insights and analyses. The platform deploys high-functioning AI models without excessive data usage, meaning businesses can unlock traditionally data-intensive benefits with a fraction of the data.
Data privacy
According to UNCTAD, nearly 80% of the world’s countries have introduced data privacy and protection laws. In those countries, enterprises must implement and adhere to the most stringent data privacy measures.
From an AIOps platform’s perspective, this means constantly securing data across infrastructures and development pipelines. As both a data controller and processor, Site24x7 is aligned with leading standards, including GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, ISO/IEC, and more.
For data protection, Site24x7 implements HTTPS with TLS 1.2/3 protocols, SHA-256 SSL certificates for authentication, and HTTPS Strict Transport Security (HSTS) to maintain secrecy.
Rest assured, sensitive data is safe and compliant with Site24x7.
Proactive security
In addition to performance lulls, a major aspect of AIOps-driven IT monitoring is to proactively catch security risks early on. This includes threats from internal system flaws and misconfigurations, as well as from external actors such as DDoS attacks.
Site24x7 features a multi-pronged approach to security, including the data security measures mentioned above. Other security offerings that augment the platform’s capabilities include:
- Supply chain management
- IAM security
- Physical security
- Vulnerability management
- Real-time threat detection
- Automation-driven incident response
The bottom line? Site24x7’s AIOps platform provides multiple layers of defense that can help protect even the most complex and dynamic IT environments.
Conclusion
In no time, AIOps has gone from being an option to an absolute non-negotiable due to complex modern IT environments—legacy monitoring solutions simply don't do the trick.
Top-of-the-line AIOps platforms deliver IT monitoring that keeps you ahead of the competition. Through automation, advanced data analytics, speed, and scalability, they ensure that IT teams can detect and remediate performance issues before an end user knows there’s a problem.
Site24x7’s AIOps platform enables efficient and seamless IT operations via powerful features that include data visualization, predictive analytics, data privacy measures, and intelligence alerting.
With Site24x7, companies can avoid IT downtime and disruptions; proactively detect and remediate issues; and reduce overall MTTD, MTTR, and ultimately, their IT stack’s TCO. Businesses need transformative AIOps and MLOps for their DevOps operations, and Site24x7 has them covered.
Interested in seeing how Site24x7 can transform your IT monitoring strategy? Request a personalized demo today.