It is increasingly clear that tools developed to keep a single system or a small cluster running are no longer sufficient in today’s highly distributed, complex environment. The tools that offer service assurance must be able to move their way through complex application systems and prevent slowdowns or application failures. These complex systems now include physical systems, virtual systems and even systems found in a cloud service provider’s data center.

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.