By providing organizations with an approach to optimize and automate IT operations, AIOps offers a number of benefits including simplicity and cost savings. So it's no surprise that it is expected to see large jump in growth in the next couple of years.
The market for AIOps technologies and services is forecast to generate $2.3 billion in revenue by 2024 according to analyst firm Omdia, a stark increase from the $913 million that was reported in 2020. There are a number of reasons why the AIOps market is seeing such growth, not the least of which is the fact that organizations of all sizes are always looking for ways to improve productivity.
While AIOps does include automation elements, there are many more AIOps benefits, Gab Menachem, senior director of Product Management, IT Operations Management (ITOM), at ServiceNow, told ITPro Today. Using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), AIOps makes use of historical incident data, change data, and operational data such as metrics, logs, and events to predict anomalies before they turn into larger outages, recommend solutions, and auto-remediate actions should incidents reoccur, he said.
"Without intelligent recommendations, automation tools can only accomplish so much," Menachem said. "AIOps uplevels automation by pairing it with AI and ML so that companies can fully unlock true human potential by removing manual tasks and taking the guesswork out of decision-making."
Myths and Misconceptions about AIOps
There are a few myths and misconceptions about what AI and AIOps can actually do.
"AI is not going to save us," Heath Newburn, solutions specialist of AIOps, automation, and digital operations at PagerDuty, told ITPro Today. "Vendors have been trying to show AI as the end-all and be-all for 30+ years, and we still don't have ITOps as a black box or 'set it and forget it' type of solution."
Rather, what organizations actually need is a way to intelligently balance critical workloads between humans and their machines so that teams can manage their most valuable resource, which is time, Newburn said. True AIOps is a combination of machine learning and automation capabilities that enable teams to reduce noise, identify and contextualize information faster, accelerate remediation, and proactively identify issues before they happen, he said.
AIOps also isn't just a single thing, but rather it's about process, bringing multiple insights, tools, and operations together. Every enterprise has a set of tools, which are generating tremendous amounts of data, explained Dinesh Nirmal, general manager for IBM Automation at IBM. Those tools commonly include application performance monitoring (APM), log management, database, and IT monitoring technologies.
"I think all the tools exist, but … infusing AI into the data to really drive predictability into it is what I call AIOps,'' Nirmal told ITPro Today.
AIOps Benefits
AIOps is not a panacea for all that ails IT operations, but it does provide a specific set of benefits for organizations.
The key AIOps benefits, according to Nirmal, include the following:
Simplicity. Complexity exists in enterprises, especially when they use the hybrid cloud, Nirmal said. AIOps can help with simplicity by aggregating information across deployments.
Skills. There's a shortage of skilled IT professionals, so it's vital to optimize their time. AIOps isn't just about using automation to replace human labor — it's about optimizing human labor, according to Nirmal. To optimize labor, a lot of tasks must be automated to free up IT staff to focus on high-value tasks.
Predictability. Another value AIOps brings to IT operations is predictability. It's possible to use AIOps to help prevent and predict issues that could lead to future outages, Nirmal said.
Cost savings. Reducing complexity and the amount of time an IT team has to spend on certain tasks can result in cost savings.
"With AIOps optimization in place, that leads to some amount of cost savings that an enterprise could definitely use," Nirmal said.
