AIOps Expo – a new event from TMC about how artificial intelligence is impacting and improving IT operations and business outcomes – is just around the corner. But there’s still time to register.
If you’re still noodling on whether this event is for you, here’s a sample of the kind of speakers and topics we’ll have on tap for AIOps Expo, which is Jan. 30 through Feb. 1 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Today we’re talking with Gadi Oren. He’s vice president of products at LogicMonitor. Gadi will help kick off AIOps Expo by participating in a panel called “AIOps 101” and a stand-alone session titled “The State of IT Service Delivery.” Here’s an excerpt of our conversation.
Tell us about LogicMonitor.
Gadi: LogicMonitor sells a monitoring and analytics solution that is automated, highly scalable, supports hybrid environments, and is the most extensible infrastructure monitoring solution on the market.
[M]onitoring is still very hard to do well for most companies. IT environments are getting more and more complex, and the majority of companies are moving towards a hybrid environment, where they have a blend of on-premises, private, and sometimes multiple cloud environments. With devices ranging all the way from IoT, through networking, wireless, servers, storage systems, databases, and more, the diversity is so high that most companies end up using multiple categories of monitoring.
LogicMonitor supports over 1,100 device integrations and is the most advanced solution for hybrid environments. It is provided as a SaaS, and as a result it is very simple to implement and provides value almost immediately.
The extensibility of LogicMonitor enables quickly creating new data collection integration if needed, by LogicMonitor, a third party, or even the customer himself. With deep analytics, LogicMonitor provides a view into the environment and removes the burden of having to develop monitoring expertise in-house. LogicMonitor enables companies to focus and excel in what they do, and efficiently leverage the full potential of their IT environment towards that goal.
Who is the customer in this case?
Gadi: The customer is an SMB, an enterprise, or an MSP, with an IT that is critical for the success of their business. The buyer users are a mix of Ops groups and DevOps (with the majority being ops). Other users in the organization are NOC teams, and different level of management getting regular high level dashboards and reports.
You’ll be speaking at AIOps Expo early next year. What does AIOps mean to you, and why are we hearing about this new technology now?
Gadi: AIOps to us means Algorithmic IT Operations. In general - using any advanced algorithm, like AIOps, that can create value for the customer and help automate the day to day activities of IT and align them with the business goals of their company.
As with other technologies it was in the making for the last 10 years at least. We hear about it now as a result of a few market trends: virtualization and the cloud created a situation of abundance of computing power and a shift in how applications are being delivered. This led to [a] sharp increase in IT size and complexity. In addition, many of the building blocks available for IT are more complex, to support these trends. The result is that IT management is increasingly complex. IT teams are in need of help more than ever before, because the ability to manage IT is directly influencing the ability of companies to be successful in the market. At the same time, the abundance of computing power created an opportunity to leverage advanced algorithms that were not practical just a few years ago. The emergence of AIOps as a term happened because these trends are maturing in terms of the needs as well as the ability to provide a solution and address these needs.
How does LogicMonitor leverage artificial intelligence and/or machine learning?
Gadi: LogicMonitor is using a variety of ML algorithms. They range from advanced forecasting of near future resource consumption, detecting abnormal activity on the network, determining relationships between IT elements, detecting correlated activities, and using tree and graph decision structures to assist with determination of possible root causes. LogicMonitor continually researches and follow[s] the state of art in ML in order to find new and more efficient ways to understand and automate IT operations.
How does AIOps relate to application performance monitoring?
Gadi: We believe that AIOps is a very general domain that is not tied to a specific type of monitoring. However it is likely [that] different companies would explore different domains within monitoring based on their expertise and the makeup of their customers.
You’ve been talking lately about how monitoring needs to become more opinionated. What does that mean?
Gadi: Before the current IT trends, when IT environments where less complex and the building blocks of IT were more simple constructs, monitoring tools' main challenge was to be able to gather all the information [in] a reliable manner and be able to display it. This was a fairly difficult challenge, and it was reasonable to assume that the user is highly familiar with the IT environment he/she is managing and understands the context of the data presented. In these days, it was sufficient to bring and display the data and the user took it from there. Monitoring systems would present the data with minimal or no interpretation of the findings.
However, as a result of the trends I have described, the level of complexity is so high that IT teams need a lot more assistance. The old assumptions are starting to fail. IT and its building blocks are so complex and rapidly changing that assuming that the user is an expert in all different aspects and technology stacks within the IT and that they know the exact structure of their infrastructure/applications up to the minute, is an incorrect set of assumptions. So the old school tools that provided signals and data without interpretation are OK. But solutions that would read into the data and provide interpretation, or an opinion are going to be much more valuable to IT teams. Solutions that would be successfully opinionated would ultimately disrupt the older solutions. AIOps is a part of achieving the ability to have a deeper understanding of the data.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
