There is a lot of activity in the AIOps vendor market today. With that activity can come a lot of noise and many varying approaches and points of view, and quite a few thought leaders have offered their thoughts on the potential value of AIOps solutions. (Here’s a great take from our own CTO: The Truth About AIOps.) But most IT practitioners starting projects today want to know how they can use AIOps to make their teams more productive in the near term. If you’re in the early stages of evaluating different vendors in this space, it would be helpful to bootstrap that evaluation effort with some background on the core capabilities that constitute an AIOps solution. In their recent Market Guide for AIOps Platforms, Gartner has helpfully laid them out. A Gartner Market Guide defines an emerging market and explains what clients can expect it to do in the short term, outlining the attributes of vendor offerings and how those offerings are likely to evolve. Zenoss was proud to be named a Representative Vendor in Gartner's Market Guide for AIOps Platforms. Additionally, we are one of only a handful of vendors to be recognized in both the Gartner Market Guide for AIOps Platforms and the Gartner Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools. Our clients routinely enjoy the benefits of having both an IT infrastructure monitoring solution and an AIOps platform in a single product. Here are the three core capabilities that any AIOps solution worth your consideration should include according to Gartner.
1. Data Ingestion and Handling
The quality of insight coming from any analytics tool is directly related to its access to a plentiful supply of clean data. So, it’s no surprise that Gartner calls data ingestion out as its first key capability. It’s incredibly important for an AIOps platform to have access to all kinds of machine data, including metrics, logs and infrastructure model graphs. It’s also important for the platform to retain historical data as well as offer real-time data ingestion. Zenoss lets you reap the benefits of the complete context offered by high-cardinality data. It leverages model-informed machine learning for the most advanced AIOps capabilities, applied to any data type. In addition to agentless data collection from any infrastructure resource, Zenoss adds a push data framework that supports agents to collect data from Kubernetes and Prometheus as well as a gostatsd agent to accept data from any other source. Combined with a developer-friendly API, this flexible framework enables data collection from ephemeral devices, custom applications, serverless infrastructure and IoT/edge-of-network devices.
2. Machine Learning Analytics
Perhaps Gartner should have called this capability “Machine Learning and Analytics” because there are all kinds of analytic approaches that AIOps platforms can find useful that don’t rely on any kind of machine learning. For example, in the AIOps blog I mentioned above, our CTO identifies nine key analytics capabilities that are used in the AIOps universe. Different AIOps solutions use different approaches to provide useful analysis for IT Ops teams. For example, Zenoss uses statistics, discovers patterns, detects anomalies, determines root cause, and applies an infrastructure model to topographical context analysis.
3. Remediation
The nirvana state for an AIOps platform is to provide a system that automatically detects, correctly diagnoses and repairs performance problems experienced by business applications before any user notices. The platform would then send a friendly email to the IT team telling them what went wrong and how it was fixed, and sign off by inviting the entire IT team to stay in bed and offering suggestions for what to binge watch on Netflix. We’re not quite there yet, but current-generation AIOps solutions like Zenoss offer tight integrations with other ITOM systems, like ticketing, so that incident notifications are quickly sent to the most applicable team for resolution. There are all sorts of other great insights included in this Gartner report. If you’d like to check it out, get your free copy of the Gartner Market Guide for AIOps Platforms.
