Observability and AIOps cuts through the complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud environments to rapidly identify the root causes of issues. This can short circuit the blame game and reduce MTTR.
Hybrid and multi-cloud environments can be incredibly complex, supporting hundreds of interdependent applications. A seemingly minor misconfiguration in one part of the environment could have cascading effects that cause a mission critical application in the cloud to slow to a crawl.
Due to this complexity, when a service is down, all too often, different teams — networking, applications, cloud, and more — spend their time trying to prove that they’re not responsible for the outage instead of working together to resolve it.
Here\’s an example. Imagine a large consumer brand wants to start selling directly to consumers. So, after making a significant investment in developing an e-commerce site — which is integrated into inventory, catalogue, shipping, and logistics systems — it launches and customers love it. Until Black Friday, when the entire site slows to a crawl, with customers abandoning their shopping carts left and right. Is it something in the network? Are cloud resources misconfigured? What about the code for the e-commerce site? Could it be a broken integration? The database?
The pressure is intense. Every minute of down time translates to lost revenue and disappointed customers. So, each of these teams dives into their tools, poring over mountains of data with the goal of demonstrating that the outage is … not their problem.
Playing the “IT blame game” is a significant waste of time and resources, but in a traditional IT organization, it’s an understandable reaction. No one wants their team to bear responsibility for a serious IT issue, and the intricate web of dependencies for modern applications makes it difficult to get a clear answer about issues’ root causes.
Only observability can put a stop to it, and that’s not possible using legacy tools. IT teams are facing thousands, even millions of data points about the environment coming in every minute from servers, routers, containers, the cloud and more. Certainly, legacy tools can provide some visibility into the domain in which they work, but this means that achieving a holistic view remains out of reach. The networking team only has visibility into the network, and the cloud team is only aware of what’s happening in the cloud. Modern apps are intertwined with all these environments.
Holistic observability requires artificial intelligence (AI), which either collects data from myriad sources or hooks into a single aggregated platform, then analyzes it to separate the signal from the noise. Observability enables IT to understand what’s most important at any given moment.
But observability is just the first step. The next step is to enable AIOps, which correlates information from many different sources to rapidly identify the root cause. By automating routine tasks such as data collection, analysis, and remediation, AIOps empowers IT teams to respond to incidents proactively and with greater agility. In fact, AIOps can often resolve issues automatically before anyone ever realizes there’s a problem.
So, with fewer incidents to address and a faster mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) for those that remain, IT teams can spend less time firefighting and more time developing new capabilities and shoring up the environment to prevent outages.
BMC Helix IT Operations Management (ITOM) is a fully integrated observability and AIOps solution that provides ML/AI-powered discovery, monitoring, optimization, automation, and remediation of services. BMC Helix ITOM empowers IT to prevent incidents and deliver ML-powered reliable services, enabling fast innovation.
To learn more about how BMC Helix observability and AIOps can end the IT blame game, visit us here.
