Introduction
Organizations are drawn to the promise of #AIOps to leverage AI-driven Intelligence and automation to make quick and accurate decisions to maintain resiliency. AIOps uses artificial intelligence to simplify IT operations management and accelerate and automate problem resolution in complex modern IT environments. A recent blog by Sanjay Chandru set the stage for guiding you on Best practices for taking a hybrid approach to AIOps. We learned that a key capability of AIOps is to act. Acting swiftly to resolve issues with intelligent automation.
In this blog we will focus on Intelligent Automation: strongly reduce the need for coding to implement cross-enterprise system automation with end-to-end, goal driven policy-based system automation for consistent and reliable automation across the enterprise.
Client challenges
IT operations teams face three main challenges in today’s market: innovation vs stability, maintenance cost of automation code and skill optimization.
While most of the CIOs would like to invest more in innovation, 70% of the team is tied up just keeping what they already have alive. Moreover, every innovation is a source of potential disruption in the IT environment and IT Operational Resiliency is a must more than ever, every critical incident has a cost in terms of money as well image damage.
Next two challenges are somehow correlated, most of the enterprises rely on coding to implement the automation, but it has a huge maintenance cost and, from time to time, there is even a skill issue, with the original developers of the automation code leaving the company, due to retirement or for whatever reason. The generational shift, that cause the loss of experiences Z people, is a general trend that is impacting most of the enterprises running a mainframe, with the associated challenge to reduce the need for expertise and manual intervention.
What's now required and how different then what I have today?
Today, many enterprises are still operating in organizational silos without a common automation tool cross platform, relying on different tools and coding to implement the automation. Documentation on automation code is poor and maintenance of that is not cost effective.
Due to the growth of hybrid cloud applications, more and more frequently business applications rely on resources that span across different platforms, that have dependencies on each other. Resiliency of these applications and availability of the related services rely on the resiliency of all the components. It is crucial to leverage an automation tool that enables an end-to-end view of the enterprise and of the automated resources, keeping track of the dependencies even cross platform.
How IBM can help
IBM Z Service Automation Suite provides a full set of tools to automate your enterprise cross platform, with a user-friendly user interface (IBM Service Management Unite) and the possibility to enable a collaborative problem solving with the recent addition of IBM Z ChatOps. IBM Z System Automation (an IBM Z NetView application) provides E2E automation capabilities to manage in a consistent and reliable way to automate resources across platforms from a single point of control. With the ability to establish dependencies between resources running on different platforms, everything defining goal-oriented policies for a policy-based automation that strongly reduces the need for coding and automation maintenance. Another important component of the suite is IBM Z Workload Scheduler, that provides the ability to automate any unattended process, with the possibility to have dependencies specified as well event driven scheduling, for job running over different platforms.
One of the key IBM differentiators in this space is the combination of IBM Service Management Unite and IBM Z ChatOps, that makes IBM Z Service Automation Suite a complete offering to reduce the mean time to resolution of the incidents that can happen in your Z environment. Service Management Unite provides a set of highly customizable dashboards to manage automation across platforms and across domains from a single point of control. IBM Z ChatOps provides a chatbot to interact with Z resources from the chat tool already in use.
Client outcome
With IBM Z System Automation and Z NetView, a bank in Slovenia reduced the amount of time needed to perform system procedures by more than 50 percent. IBM’s automation tools improved the accuracy of commands for the central computer and reduced errors caused by manual work.
What are my next steps?
Depending on where you are on your journey to adopting more of these AIOps best practices we are sharing the following resources to obtain a deeper understanding:
- To assess your current stage of AIOps maturity and identify action oriented next steps for adopting more AIOps best practices, inquire about the 15-minute online AIOps Assessment for IBM Z.
- Join the AIOps on IBM Z Community to follow this blog series about best practices for taking a hybrid approach to AIOps
- And finally, to research our IBM Z products that are implementing AIOps technologies to improve operational resiliency visit our product portfolio page.