Managing hybrid applications can be a challenge for IT Operations teams due to large volumes of data, organizational siloes and disparate data sources. Enterprises find it difficult to prioritize the most important IT incidents as they sift through the numerous alerts/incidents the different tools provide them. It also increases the days to detect and diagnose a complex issue, driving up costs, reducing incident free days and potential exposure to regulator penalties.
From an operations team perspective, the SME’s working on resolving these incidents struggle with inconsistent alerts, workflow interruptions due to the need to switch between different tools. Moreover, enterprises need to also protect skilled FTEs to meet SLA and resiliency demands, as many of them leave the workforce or find other roles to avoid burnout.
Hence, leading IT organizations turn to AIOps to help improve IT operational resiliency and the productivity of their teams. The purpose of this blog is to be your one stop shopping for a series of blogs that we will do on the topic from our handbook “Best practices for taking a hybrid approach to AIOps”. As each blog is posted addressing a capability, we will update this blog with the links, thus at the end, this will be your one stop shopping blog to bookmark for reference.
The three key capability areas of AIOps that can be applied to empower IBM Z IT ops teams, and accelerate customer AIOps journeys, include accurately detecting emerging problems across hybrid cloud, diagnosing and deciding how to fix problems quickly in dynamic and complex environments and acting swiftly to resolve issues with intelligent automation.
Here is a break out of the AIOps for IBM Z framework:
Cross capabilities for integrated workflows
· Collaborative incident remediation: provides improved collaboration and faster incident resolution through chat-based operations and user-friendly dashboards
Detect
· Monitoring: identify poorly performing APIs quickly for faster resolution with full-stack monitoring for early detection of Z incidents
· Hybrid cloud observability: Avoid blind-spots in application observability with end-to-end transaction tracing including z/OS resources
· Anomaly detection: outage avoidance with advanced notification of unusual behavior prior to end-user or SLA impact
Decide
· Deep domain metrics and trace analysis: enable domain experts to diagnose application bottlenecks within code, server resources or external dependencies
· Log analytics: accelerate hybrid incident identification with real-time operational analytics
· Anomaly correlation: rapidly reduce time to identify root cause with anomalous correlations between z/OS subsystems
· Performance & capacity management: standardize forecasting for improved usage and capacity planning reports with advanced modeling
Act
· 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
· Predictive workload automation: enable predictive workload automation with open scheduling for integration with DevOps and hybrid cloud solutions
· Storage automation: Automated repetitive and time consuming storage tasks and transform them into best practice policies that can be initiated on command or triggered when an event occurs requiring little or no human intervention
· Resiliency: High-value resiliency management of non-database data creating a comprehensive inventory of data usage, reducing manual recovery efforts during data-corruption incidents
Depending on where you are on your journey to adopting more of these AIOps best practices we have developed the following resources:
· Join the AIOps on IBM Z Community to follow the launch of the blog series describing the above best practices and to engage directly with our AIOps product teams. Note: We will update this blog with hyperlinks to the individual blogs as they become available, so stop back here for the full picture.
· And finally, to research our IBM Z products that are implementing AIOps technologies to improve operational resiliency visit our product portfolio page.