Three great things that do not always work great together. In the beginning there were large computer systems that few organizations could afford. Over time these systems became smaller and cheaper and many (if not most) organizations took advantage of them. Some just at the end-user level (i.e. the IBM PC on the desk), some only at the high-end level (i.e. a mainframe in the data center with terminals on desks), and some in a combination of both (anyone remember Reflection?).

Organizations struggle with getting the right visibility into their environments. Better visibility can improve performance, increase uptime (or decrease downtime, depending on your perspective) and ultimately improve customer satisfaction. Finding the right tool, however, can be a real challenge. Making matters even worse, vendors seem to be announcing new observability platforms every day.

AIOps is one of the current buzzwords (buzz-initialisms?) that is hot in the monitoring space. Everyone seems to be talking about it. How you have to have it, how much better it will make everything if only you just had it, etc. But how much of that is real and how much of that is wishful thinking? Let’s take a look and see if we can separate the buzz from the words.

When it comes to monitoring and specifically IT Operations Monitoring (ITOM), everyone is saying monitoring is dead – you need observability. Vendors are jumping on the observability bandwagon. There’s a lot of noise about observability, network observability, full-stack observability and every other kind of observability you can imagine. This is a topic we have touched on in the past.