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Assure application performance with AIOps

01

3 min read

Why you need AIOps and IT automation

Today’s digital businesses depend on the performance and availability of critical business applications and the infrastructure on which they run.

Watch: Where is your organization in AIOps adoption?

According to a McKinsey study, CIOs cited the need to react more quickly as the top reason for making changes to their organizations.¹

A lack of visibility across hybrid and multicloud environments, rising costs, inefficient resourcing decisions and lack of centralized control has slowed the ability to digitally transform their business. The use of technologies such as virtual machines, container-based microservices and shared multi-tenant infrastructure can accelerate application development, but introduces operational complexity.

Modern applications are often separated by multiple layers of abstraction, making it difficult to understand which underlying physical server, storage and networking resources are supporting which applications. Traditional methods of forecasting resource requirements based on “set it and forget it” estimates can lead to overallocation of resources, or worse yet, starve applications during usage spikes. Even with an additional resource margin, performance isn’t assured due to the unpredictable nature of modern application demands.

Resource optimization that requires an operator to manually update the production environment will fall short in dynamic demand situations. To stay relevant, modern organizations are turning to a new, AIOps-driven approach that improves speed, utilization and service delivery.

  • Faster decision-making: Full-stack, enterprise observability
  • Smarter resource allocation: Dynamic resource management and cost optimization
  • Predictive AIOps: Autonomous problem determination, remediation and avoidance

It’s also important to consider a collaborative consulting approach that is attentive to your specific needs and goals, and dedicated to helping you achieve breakthrough innovations with exponential impact.

Keep reading to learn how IBM AIOps solutions can enhance and simplify your IT operations. You can also talk to an IBM expert anytime.

02

3 min read

Faster decision-making

Full-stack and enterprise observability

Before Instana, if a bug slipped into production, it could take developers up to three days to find the root cause and permanently fix the issue. With Instana, we’re immediately notified with the root cause, and we can resolve the problem in a third of the time or less.”
Kirill Merkushev
Head of Backend
Vivy

The challenge

Traditional monitoring tools lack the visibility that’s required to manage the performance of modern IT environments and address potential bottlenecks before they impact users. You need to automatically ingest observability metrics, tracing every request and profiling all processes across microservice platforms.

Key use case: Application monitoring

Asking developers to add extensive logging code for monitoring takes time away for high-value code production. With a combination of automated instrumentation and judicious manual code logging, your applications can support enterprise-level observability based on health and performance metrics, distributed traces, and logs.

An observable system enables you to collect diagnosis and resolution data from your production environment in near real-time. This process helps your ITOps team resolve incidents more rapidly, even when services are widely distributed. With reliable, complete metrics and distributed tracing from your production systems, your team will escape the problem resolution “blame game” since your captured data will point to the responsible components rather than relying on hunches.

The solution

IBM Observability by Instana® APM is an application performance management (APM) platform that handles automated instrumentation for many popular runtime environments, such as Java, Node, and Python, without requiring multiple agents. The application-level metrics, tracing and logs are captured in production and analyzed for a synthesized view of your application and infrastructure estate.

Reduce time to debug applications by 75%.”1

Your ITOps and development teams can use the Instana dashboards to monitor your application performance with intelligent grouping, giving them end-to-end visibility—all the way from the user's browser to the services and infrastructure layer.

Learn more: Talk to an expert

03

3 min read

Smarter resource management

Dynamic resource management and cost optimization

The challenge

Traditional IT management tools and processes can’t assure the performance of increasingly complex and dynamic applications that are distributed across private, public and multicloud environments running virtual servers and containers.

These traditional systems and processes attempt to assure performance through over allocation of resources. This approach won’t work for increasingly dynamic and complex applications, nor will manually applied updates scale to systems that have complex compliance requirements.

ITOps managers and site reliability engineers (SREs) need a top-down, application-driven approach that continuously analyzes the resource needs of applications. With this analysis, fully automated actions assure that applications get what they need to perform while conforming to your company’s IT policies.

Key use case: Resource utilization

You don’t need apply an over-provisional “security blanket” to avoid resource problems. You don’t need to sacrifice performance to save money, either. The performance objective is decision automation for resource management, not just process automation.

To automate decisions with confidence, your application resource management (ARM) platform needs a full view of your application requirements. APM insights, available through auto-instrumentation with Instana and other supported APM platforms, helps the ARM platform automate resource decisions informed by large-grain measures available at the Kubernetes resources level.

The solution

Based on actual application metrics captured by APM application programming interfaces (APIs), IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management offers recommended resource optimizations for performance.

At first, you may choose to manually review these recommendations to confirm they’re correct but, over time, you’ll come to trust them and automate these decisions.

With IBM Turbonomic, applications get the resources they need through visibility, insights and actions at every layer of the application and infrastructure stack without the need for human intervention.

Learn more: Talk to an expert

Turbonomic’s automated actions not only improve performance, but they free up the team’s resources. The team now has more time to innovate rather than focusing on keeping the lights on.”
Gary Prindle
Senior Systems Engineer
Carhartt

04

3 min read

Predictive AIOps

Autonomous problem determination, remediation and avoidance

The challenge

Every business is a now a digital business, facing daily demands to evolve. Businesses are moving into new markets, addressing new segments and utilizing new channels while still maintaining quality and compliancy. Unfortunately, the hybrid and multicloud environments meant to empower teams can also unintentionally hinder them.

Complexity is driving dependency and forcing organizations to sacrifice innovation for stability, but what if you could have both? The initial promise of AI—detecting patterns and gaining insights from the past to improve the future—is becoming reality.

Key use case: Incident management

Experienced ITOps managers, developers and SREs are skilled at spotting small differences that usually lead to problem resolution. However, with cloud adoption comes decoupled services, which adds an extra burden when debugging if logs and configuration data aren’t consolidated and synchronized.

To further complicate incident resolution, dependency relationships between service A and B may not be known until runtime. This situation is where AI and machine learning can really help. Let computers sort through mountains of data and sift out potential causes.

The solution

IBM Cloud Pak for Watson® AIOps groups related events of an incident, reducing “alert storms” that waste operators’ time.

Reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) by 50%.”1

Similarly, IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOPs analyzes system data to understand what’s normal behavior, then automatically sets adaptive thresholds. This avoids the trap of fixed thresholds leading to false alarms or brewing problems going undetected.

Thanks to adaptive thresholds and log anomaly detection, issues that necessitate your IT Ops team are more likely to be discovered earlier. The alert notifications are surfaced in your ChatOps tool of choice with a hypothesized cause and summary of potentially impacted services, helping you improve your incident management capabilities.

IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps integrates with popular incident tracking tools, enabling your team to collaborate in a less formal ChatOps environment while not losing the tracking ability of traditional incident resolution tools.

IBM helps you use the power of AI with an AIOps platform that can help you automate labor-intensive processes, achieve proactive incident resolution and embrace an integrated DevSecOps model, freeing your teams to innovate in an open, hybrid cloud environment.

We see about 100,000 events per day. It is so important in this huge ocean to identify exactly the drop of venom that you have to remove to save your life.”
Joska Lot
Global Solution Service Architect:
Monitoring and Events Management
Electrolux AB

Learn more: Talk to an expert

05

4 min read

Next steps

IBM can meet you wherever you are in your AIOps journey. Spend more time on innovation and less time on troubleshooting.

We get it. You’re under enormous pressure to keep applications running and customers happy. Getting started with AIOps may seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be.

Take a few minutes to review stories from other customers across multiple industries who are working through their digital transformations.

IBM and our partner ecosystem are ready to help your business transform through an AIOps driven approach that can happen on essentially any platform or cloud. We’ll collaborate with you step by step, and start by understanding your specific challenges, goals and vision.

IBM was recently named an AIOps solutions leader in the Omdia Universe: Selecting an AIOps Solution, 2021–22 report

Let’s get started. Talk to an expert today or visit our websites below to learn more.