Johannesburg, 27 May 2022
According to Nirmal Krishnamoorthy, senior manager –product marketing, Freshworks, artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOPs) is key to overcoming several challenges faced by IT organisations today. This includes common issues such as siloed systems, voluminous data, and skill shortages.
Speaking at a Freshworks webinar on AIOPs, Krishnamoorthy touched upon the numerous new challenges faced by IT organisations in the modern world.
“We have added too many tools and many of them have become siloed, and many tools produce critical alerts for the same event. This creates alert fatigue and makes finding the root cause of an event very difficult. With the addition of cloud-native solutions and siloed systems, there is increased complexity and enormous amounts of data to contend with. At the same time, experienced IT resources are resigning in greater numbers amid the ‘Great Resignation’, which is creating a shortage of skilled knowledgeable resources.”
He elaborated on three factors preventing organisations from implementing a resilient modern ITSM system, these included: lack of a clear ITSM strategy; insufficient funds and difficulty getting buy-in from senior management; and skepticism about implementation, downtime, and delivering on business value were some of the factors he touched upon.
In fact, a poll conducted during the webinar indicated that 50% of the participants believed a lack of a clear ITSM strategy stood in their way of adopting a more advanced ITSM system, 37% cited insufficient funds and difficulty in getting buy-in from senior management, and 12% were skeptical about implementation, downtime, and delivering on business value.
Krishnamoorthy also spoke about the current trends that are influencing IT operations: “IT staff are expected to adopt a work-from-anywhere model and systems must support this. Digital transformation has been accelerated and is top of the agenda for many organisations. At the same time, there has been strong growth in data-related technologies.”
In his talk, he stressed the fact that there was a time when technology used to drive business, however, today, technology is the business. He also emphasized the need for organisations to implement AIOPs in order to stay abreast of changing trends and master new challenges.
He further stated that AIOps is more than just IT operations. It encompasses DevOps, IT service management (ITSM), incident management, observability, support, security, and KPIs/priorities from business stakeholders.
AIOPs, he explained, provide actionable insights into IT operations data across hybrid and complex environments, and should integrate with as many IT operations data collectors as possible. It should contextualize and correlate the raw data with associated events, do a deep-dive root cause analysis, and produce actionable insights. , if possible, it should automate the infrastructure, network, application, and services to create fully elastic self-healing and self-driving applications.
“The right solution should be intelligent, comprehensive, integrate with your existing tech stack, and take minimal time for users to learn and put into use. It has to be intuitive so users adopt it. The best way to show the value of the investment is when users adopt it. It should not be a siloed solution in itself,” he said.“The AIOps solution has to be right-sized – neither a behemoth nor a band-aid.,”
Krishnamoorthy highlighted the salient features of Freshservice, the ITSM suite from Freshworks.
“Freshservice is a right-sized intuitive, intelligent solution that provides contextual service delivery. the solution is extensible – easily integrating with enterprise-scale operations. As a powerful platform with advanced features and no hidden fees, Freshservice allows organisations to start small and expand as needed.”
Speaking on use cases, he said: “Measure your MTTR today, then consider why it is high or low and what this means for the business. If it is all in a single pane of glass and you can see the webserver went down and as a result, you have alerts and noise coming from different sources. AIOps allows you to see the cause and address that. Another use case is on-call management, respecting your personnel’s off time and making sure the right people are reached to work on the right issue at the right time, on their tool of choice. Happy agents make for happier employees, and happy employees deliver an amazing customer experience.”
Krishnamoorthy concluded by noting that the key benefits of implementing AIOps include delivering delightful employee experiences, always-on business, and unified service experiences. AIOps also improve the quality of support personnel’s lives and mitigate the risk of downtime, which can have a significant impact on the organisation. “It moves you from reactive IT to proactive IT and delivers a unified service experience with a self-driving, self-managing IT system that meets businesses on-demand,” he said.
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