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.

AIOps is a new solution to an age-old problem: How do I stop my team from going insane managing 15 million different tool consoles? The tool bloat problem is not new for anyone who has been in this business for more than a minute. In the old days, when IT teams were comprised of specialists in servers, storage, networking, databases and so forth, each group of specialists had a favored tool set that showed them how their little patch of the world was functioning.

If you are in IT Ops or DevOps, hardly a day goes by without someone mentioning AIOps. There are a few who think AIOps can replace IT Ops tools today. Others debate this, saying that AIOps is still a nascent field, and it will take a few more years until we see a full-fledged AIOps platform for IT operations management. But there’s always been a lot of confusion on how AIOps really works.

Not long ago, we talked about the need to maintain visibility across all of your multicloud investments so you can keep track of how well they are working for you as well as how much they are costing you. Historically, this has meant building reports on numbers of VMs in use, system utilization, storage consumption, and the like. But much has changed since the early days of hypervisors, and organizations creating cloud-based services today are moving quickly toward serverless models.

In our previous blog post, we discussed how organizations deploy new hyperconverged resources into their environments without disrupting existing platforms in place by tracking interdependencies as they integrate hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) into standard IT monitoring processes. Developing digitally native capabilities while managing ongoing IT operations can be challenging, but with industry wide adoption of HCI, a few key benefits have emerged that are shaping our modern businesses today.

SaaS customers today expect the highest levels of compliance standards when securing their data and ensuring that vendors meet their data confidentiality and privacy needs. An independent validation of security and availability controls becomes more crucial for those in highly regulated industries.

A recent Gartner report states: “Organizations with a cross-discipline cloud strategy are more likely to find success in cloud initiatives and recognize the full benefits of cloud.” Advances in machine learning and AI have opened up avenues for forward-thinking enterprises to drive extensive automation using the latest cloud technologies.

We’re quickly approaching an important inflection point in the cloud migration timeline. 451 Research estimates that by the end of next year, company-owned data centers will dip below 50% of primary IT environments as organizations move their IT investments to the cloud. They’re deciding overwhelmingly that they no longer want pets running their critical applications, they want herds of cattle.

The demand for hyperconverged systems is being fueled by enterprise IT’s need to be more flexible and to emulate the services and speed of public cloud providers. Hyperconvergence eliminates separate storage vendors, storage device troubleshooting and storage networks while providing more granular scalability. The adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure with distributed computing architecture enables large IT teams to add resources on demand with increased flexibility.

Managing the infrastructure monitoring system in a large-scale IT environment can be incredibly tedious. I’d be willing to bet that you’ve run into at least one of these issues or something similar. APIs exist because user interfaces can’t do everything, and we’re all very happy that they do! Zenoss Cloud supports two APIs: a JSON API for bulk administration and a streaming data ingest API to allow a wide variety of devices to publish data directly.