IT Operations Needs a New Wardrobe

Like sandals with white socks and jackets with shoulder pads, IT Operations is woefully outdated and desperately needs a wardrobe change. Fashionable IT tools come and go, but one way or another, IT Operations always ends up where it started: siloed, reactive, manual and slow to find root cause of business-impacting incidents.

Fortunately, we are the midst of an accelerating software revolution to address this: the AIOps (or artificial intelligence for IT operations) revolution. Unfortunately, AIOps today is beset with vendors dressing up older-generation software and making unsubstantiated claims about their AI credentials. Dell Technologies, however, has a heritage of building AI and automation into its infrastructure products. Through home-grown innovation and partnerships, Dell is extending that track record with the introduction of APEX AIOps—a unique, deeply AI-enabled, full-stack observability and incident management software-as-a-service that is:

• Exceptionally tailored to support modern AI workloads and cloud to ground/ground to cloud service reliability engineering operations.
• Backed by industry-leading outcomes, generating meaningful improvements in customer satisfaction while revolutionizing the cost of operations.

Without AIOps, Business Isn’t Dressed for Success

Today’s digital infrastructure is so complex and high scale that managing it is beyond human comprehension without the aid of machine intelligence. Add in AI workloads, and the problem just gets worse. Old tools just don’t cut it. With the continuing shift to multicloud and the extreme demands that AI workloads are placing on infrastructures, the really innovative AIOps solutions will be the trend-setters. The only way we can ensure the integrity of modern GenAI-aware digital infrastructure is by automating the infrastructure operations itself, which in turn will only be possible if AI is at the core of that activity. 

APEX AIOps Software-as-a-Service is Well-Suited for Modern Business

Dell has cleverly integrated AIOps technologies from its own software portfolio (CloudIQ), from its AI partner IBM (Instana) and from its acquisition of Moogsoft, the original AIOps pioneer, for which Dell was an early investor.

Altogether, APEX AIOps’ integrated capabilities are:

• Infrastructure Observability. AI-driven observability for Dell infrastructure health, cybersecurity and sustainability (based on Dell’s CloudIQ software enhanced with generative AI).
• Application Observability. AI-driven full-stack observability (based on the integration of Dell’s Infrastructure Observability software and IBM’s Instana Application Observability software) for assuring application reliability.
• Incident Management. AI-driven incident management to detect incidents and then simplify, automate and accelerate resolution across multivendor/cloud infrastructure (based on Dell’s acquisition of Moogsoft software).

“Dell APEX AIOps Incident Management is a core part of Cognizant’s Neuro IT Operations, which provides organizations with an AI-driven platform designed to reduce the complexity and operating costs of enterprise infrastructure and technology,” said Prasad Sankaran, EVP and Global Head, Cognizant Software and Platform Engineering. “Neuro IT Operations helps IT organizations focus less on infrastructure management and more on business impact through end-to-end AIOps for noise reduction, correlation and automated workflows for faster incident resolution.”

Infrastructure Observability: “Fashions fade, style is eternal,” Yves Saint Laurent

If anything is eternal, it’s the need for rock-solid IT infrastructure: servers, storage, data protection, networks and hyperconverged systems. Physical, virtual, on-premises, core, edge and cloud. With a portfolio of more than 100 patents, APEX AIOps Infrastructure Observability uses AI to help you maximize Dell infrastructure health, cybersecurity and sustainability. Its observability, notifications, recommendations and forecasting help you reduce risk, plan for the future and improve productivity. Infrastructure Observability is based on machine learning, time series correlation, seasonality (a.k.a., normal behavior over time), ensemble models, prophet forecasting, reinforcement learning, natural language processing, generative AI and other AI algorithms.

Figure 1: APEX AIOps Infrastructure Observability process.

Based on customer surveys APEX AIOps Infrastructure Observability delivers up to 10X faster resolution of Dell infrastructure issues and saves one day in systems administration per week on average. If you are thinking, “But I have more than Dell infrastructure in my environment,” then read on. 

Application Observability: “Clothes mean nothing until someone lives in them,” Marc Jacobs

Your business lives in your applications. So, you had better make sure they are making your customers, partners and employees look good and feel right. That means no toleration for latency. APEX AIOps Application Observability uses AI to yield high-fidelity application call, error and latency metrics with one-second granularity and correlates that with Dell infrastructure health analytics. This helps you determine if root cause is the Dell infrastructure (e.g., servers and storage) or the application itself. These insights are driven by natural language processing for automation matching, seasonality machine learning algorithms for adaptive threshold smart alerts, forecasting algorithms, machine learning model for log parsing, forecasting algorithms, generative AI and other AI algorithms. Application Observability also sees non-Dell host servers.

Figure 2: APEX AIOps Application Observability process.

This solution is an innovative integration of Dell’s APEX AIOps Infrastructure Observability and IBM’s Instana application observability software-as-a-service. Based on customer research, this technology yields up to 70% reduction in mean time to resolution of application issues and 3X increase in application deployments.

Incident Management: “Fashion is like eating, you shouldn’t stick to the same menu,” Kenzo Takada

The fact is every digital infrastructure is a multivendor/multicloud mixed menu. You must have a way to manage it altogether as one entity; otherwise, chaos will prevail. With a portfolio of more than 50 patents, APEX AIOps Incident Management uses AI to automate the entire incident lifecycle for your multivendor/multicloud environment. It ingests operational data from all your multivendor (e.g., application, infrastructure, virtualization, database, etc.) monitoring tools to reduce hundreds of thousands of events into thousands of alerts into tens of actionable incidents. Next, it differentiates each incident’s earliest alert from symptomatic alerts for probable root cause, recommends the specific manual remediation and can trigger automated remediation.

APEX AIOps Incident Management is based on supervised/unsupervised machine learning, natural language processing, deduplication/filtering, correlation, time series analysis, deep learning/neural networks, anomaly detection, causality and other AI algorithms. In fact, being the pioneer (formerly Moogsoft) in AIOps, the platform benefits from over 50 original and patented inventions. Besides out-of-the-box integrations with many incoming third-party monitoring tools, it is integrated with popular ticketing, IT communications and automation tools to trigger outgoing workflows and has an easy-to-use, do-it-yourself integration toolkit.

Figure 3: APEX AIOps Incident Management process.

Customer research shows that APEX AIOps Incident Management yields 99%-plus reduction in event noise, 50%-plus reduction in service tickets and 93% reduction in customer-reported issues.

“Over the next year, ESG expects enterprises to become more sophisticated with AI as a lever for business process acceleration, revenue growth and innovation, but this risks introducing more complexity into their IT environments.  With APEX AIOps, Dell delivers a powerful AI-driven observability and incident management solution aimed at the right problems – IT Operations complexity and efficiency.”

– Jon Brown, Senior Analyst – Enterprise Strategy Group

The Future of AIOps

Playing this all forward, the next few years will throw up some big challenges, and organizations caught with last-generation IT tools—or worse AIOps solutions that are really last gen in disguise—will suffer availability embarrassments. These embarrassments could be existential to brand reputation and potentially the companies themselves. A period of rapid adoption of real AIOps solutions will ensue, and this will improve matters. Failure to adopt proven AIOps solutions, like APEX AIOps, could become a defining choice for businesses.

Source: dell.com