Since establishing AppCentrix in 2010, we have seen many organisations consume monitoring tools and services from leading providers, yet still not realise the full potential and value of their investments. Implications include increased costs, or increased noise in the operations with no reduction in resolution times, no improvement in up-time, or bland business reports that do not inform decision making.
In our experience, the true value of monitoring capabilities is not only in the events triggered or the visibility gained, but also in the strategic insights gained from data that can drive, shape or alter the course of the business and day to day operations. Despite collecting more data now than ever before, industry commentators and analysts indicate that over 70% of the operational data available to IT Ops teams is not actionable.
The business case for automation and AIOps as part of the digital transformation agenda is clear. Today, it is important to track each individual layer and component of an organisation’s IT infrastructure, and applications and human effort cannot cope with the huge volumes of data being processed. This makes AIOps a compelling fit to providing the depth of visibility needed.
But how do you go about establishing AIOps?
Monitoring is now a recognised priority to minimise or prevent outages and application performance problems. Turning data points from various monitoring tools into actionable insights results in a proactive, early-action IT management style. However, the data must be up to date, and it must have context.
It is pivotal that monitoring as a discipline is adopted as an overarching approach in the organisation. It is a practice designed to help IT professionals escape the short-term, reactive nature of administration often caused by insufficient monitoring, and become more proactive and strategic.
In our monitoring as a discipline approach, developed over the last decade of working with clients on their monitoring journey, AppCentrix has established four distinct steps to AIOps.
Management: Team leaders have a responsibility to provide a clear mission, vision and objective when instilling monitoring as a discipline. Our Clarity Workshop is a great tool for obtaining a cohesive strategy.
Assembly: This step looks at onboarding technologies to clearly identify which systems to depend on and those that need to be integrated. Ideally, you should spend more time planning and prepping before switching to discovery to avoid reworking and wasting time.
Adoption: Comprehensive training strategies for engineers will impact organisational culture, because when people understand their toolsets and how to use them efficiently, they become independent and proactive instead of reactive.
Delivery: The final step is to provide insights into the organisation, identify hot spots, contextualise information, and identify tasks that can be automated.
It is important to incorporate these steps, so they become part of the organisation’s ongoing culture and vision. This may involve reassessment after delivery and restarting these four steps. Alternatively, consider reviewing the roadmap every year.
The interplay between technology, process and people is what enables functionality.
AppCentrix brings together the technology, processes and people through our own expertise and platform approach. For monitoring as a discipline to pave the way for effective AIOps, certain steps and actions must be undertaken methodically and meticulously, and we work with you to get this right.
A successful digital transformation is not linear – you don’t simply buy technology or a service, plug it in and reach an end point. Rather, it is a journey, one that AppCentrix undertakes as a trusted partner with its customers.
AppCentrix can work with you to instill monitoring as a discipline and together, execute the provision of value-based analytics from traditional monitoring capabilities.
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