A Harrowing Landscape The increasing complexity of modern services is forcing IT Ops teams to employ a growing landscape of disparate tools to monitor the health of their IT Stack. In fact, the number of tools has grown so much in the last few years, that one wonders how IT Ops teams are even able to effectively configure, maintain, ingest, and process all the events that these tools create.
Every NOC engineer will tell you that the first thing they look for in an outage is “what changed?”. And they are right to look. While every organization is unique, Gartner reports that on average about 80% of IT incidents today are caused by changes in infrastructure and/or software.
Close to IT 400 professionals from some of the most prominent enterprises in the retail, financial, technology, pharma and manufacturing industries attended our “Face of IT Ops from Home” virtual conference, enjoying a keynote session featuring Sony Playstation and State Farm Insurance, and three breakout sessions with Ulta Beauty, AWS and BlackRock 3.
As the Coronavirus crisis unfolds and all of us struggle to understand its implications and to adapt, many thoughts come to mind on many different levels – personal, business related, philosophical. This event is definitely a game changer, in the near future for sure – and many say in the long run as well.
“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change” said Charles Darwin over 150 years ago – and probably every IT Ops engineer out there these days would agree with him. According to Gartner (and probably your experience as well), over 80% of service disruptions these days are caused by changes in infrastructure and software.
The current days of remote work and “IT Ops from home” may or may not be here to stay, but they definitely reinforce the need for consolidating and modernizing our monitoring. The challenges which multiple siloed tools create for understanding the big picture are only exacerbated by having just one screen to look at when monitoring our IT from our kitchen table.
When I read Greg Ferro’s infamous “Why I hate ITIL so much” blog back in 2015, I have to admit that I agreed with many (albeit not all) of what he said. Maybe it’s the issues that I have with authority in general, or maybe it’s my many years of working within the constraints of ITIL and ITSM in operating systems and services – but I truly believed (and still do) that well-educated, experience and consensus-based pragmatism is what actually gets things done.
As a former NOC engineer, I clearly remember my onboarding, and especially the deep-rooted fear I felt every time I encountered an alert that was new to me – particularly during a night shift. My only consolation was that I was never alone during training, so there was always someone I could ask that very awkward question: “I’m new here, what do we do with this…?”
In the past, many organizations grew and managed their own data centers. Some still do. And many are still developing their own automated incident management (aka Autonomous Operations) tools. But as IT grows and becomes evermore complex and fast-moving, the reality of what it means to do so kicks in, and organizations are re-evaluating their strategies.
Since the term ‘AIOps’ came into use in the monitoring sector a couple of years ago, there has been much confusion about what it means. We hear from users asking if they need it – a difficult question given that the answer depends on how you define it. Since there isn’t a broadly accepted definition, a range of vendors now market their products as AIOps offerings, even though these products cross subsectors and may not be directly competitive.
