AIOps use cases: technical, operational, and business
ITOps is at a crossroads: Teams struggle to manage a high volume of alerts and coordinate between different tools and teams. Teams also must balance cloud technologies’ agility and on-premise solutions’ stability. The sheer speed of today’s IT demands both flexibility and visibility in development and harmonized tech stacks.
AIOps offers a clear path forward with numerous use cases, including reducing alert noise, automating incident response, integrating diverse tools, uniting teams, and seamlessly unifying cloud and on-premise systems.
By understanding the many AIOps use cases across technical, operational, and business processes, you’ll discover ways to intelligently filter out false alarms, boost operational efficiency, and prioritize events based on their potential business impact. Learn why ITOps, DevOps, and SRE teams use AIOps to move toward faster, more effective IT performance.
In this article, you’ll learn about a range of topics, including:
- Top AIOps use cases
- How AIOps supports different tech frameworks
- Technical AIOps use cases
- Operational AIOps use cases
- Business AIOps use cases
- What are examples of AIOps in different industries?
Top AIOps use cases
The use cases for AIOps fall into three categories: technical, operational, and business. These use cases involve many stakeholders, from frontline operations teams to CEOs. But generally, the impact becomes more strategic for operational and business use cases.
For operational use cases, this means unifying siloed teams, tools, and cloud architecture. For business cases, this means strategic use cases that improve service availability, develop agility, and optimize the IT function so you can gain operational efficiencies and enhance development speed.
AIOps with different tech frameworks
AIOps can benefit any technology framework. That includes DevOps, IT Service Management (ITSM), and SREs.
- AIOps and ITSM: IT Service Management (ITSM) is the traditional method of IT management using ITIL best practices. The system administrator plays the central role here. AIOps speeds up the triage and resolution of IT issues under ITSM.
- AIOps and DevOps: DevOps is a culture and set of practices that make the application delivery workflow more efficient and unify development and IT operations stakeholders. Automation plays a significant role in DevOps, often through CI/CD pipelines. AIOps supports this approach by accelerating development, enhancing collaboration, and improving system health. Using AIOps for event correlation also helps DevOps teams rapidly detect and repair issues before they affect users.
- AIOps and SRE: SRE teams focus on system health and maximizing uptime. Automation is also essential to the SRE function, which seeks to eliminate repetitive work, standardize processes, and break down silos. AIOps supports SREs by making the task of preventing system degradation easier.
Technical AIOps use cases
Technical use cases for AIOps range from addressing the daily flow of alerts to automating incident response. These use cases prioritize, detect, and remedy issues to ensure that networks, hardware, and applications run smoothly. Technical AIOps use cases include:
- Reduce alert volume and workload for IT teams
- Automate incident detection
- Automated root cause analysis
- Automate incident response
- Accelerate incident triage
Reduce alert volume and workload for IT teams
Today’s complex computing environments have led companies to deploy numerous monitoring tools, with large organizations using over 15 to oversee critical applications and resources. The surge in these tools leads to an overwhelming number of alerts, challenging ITOps, NOC, DevOps, and SRE teams to discern critical issues.
Traditional attempts to solve this problem include filtering only high-severity alerts, adding staff, or relying on customers to report problems, often making teams reactive. However, with AIOps software, your teams can process large amounts of event data in real-time, analyze it, and detect meaningful insights.
AIOps platforms can also automate creating tickets, sending notifications, convening team members, initiating workflows, and triaging incidents. They reduce workload for IT teams and correlate different alerts to a single cause, with top-tier AIOps platforms helping to reduce IT disturbances by up to 95%.
Automate incident detection
As AIOps tools learn from their environment, they can automate incident detection. The fragmented tools in most enterprises typically look only at part of the computing landscape and do not integrate. This leaves the monitoring data siloed and makes cross-stack insights hard to obtain.
Advanced AIOps platforms connect these tools and combine their data in real-time. They provide a unified view, making it possible to enrich monitoring alerts with context from other data sources. This process gives greater visibility into the scope and root causes of incidents and outages. Additionally, enterprises that face compliance regulations can use AIOps to flag security threats and other issues.
Automated root cause analysis
The best AIOps platforms provide an automated investigation of events. They use AI/ML to perform root cause analysis of system changes, topology, and incident timelines. Rapid infrastructure changes in enterprises, especially with cloud architectures, often lead to incidents.
Change management tools don’t track many of these shifts, making it hard to know which change caused an incident. AIOps software integrates vast amounts of data by comparing changes to real-time monitoring alerts to discover root-cause changes.
By making actionable insights from different tools easily accessible, AIOps solutions allow for faster investigation. Topology modeling adds to accuracy, and incident visualization helps create a timeline of symptoms and events so that in a single view, users can see when each alert in an incident occurred.
Automate incident response
AIOps platforms streamline incident management by automating ticket creation, notifications, team coordination, and triaging. Manual processes, like ticketing through emails or Slack, can be error-prone and time-consuming.
Automating responses ensures vital members, including Level 3 and DevOps, quickly convene with all pertinent data available during major incidents. Traditional triage often misses critical incident context, such as business impact, and prolongs MTTR. AIOps platforms make incorporating business context easy, speed up resolution, and automatically sync information on incident resolution progress to lower MTTR.
Accelerate incident triage
AIOps employs advanced algorithms and machine learning to swiftly analyze and prioritize incoming incidents based on their potential impact and urgency. This automated incident triage ensures all the right people are at the table, that everyone can communicate, and that all the relevant operational data is accessible.
AIOps platforms make it easy to incorporate business context and relevant information to speed up resolution. AIOps platforms also automatically sync incident progress information. By automating the initial assessment and incident progress sharing, AIOps ensures faster, more accurate incident triage, enabling IT teams across your organization to rapidly address critical issues.
Operational AIOps use cases
The use cases for AIOps in operations focus on simplification and communication. You can use AIOps tools to streamline processes, optimize performance, and improve collaboration. Operational AIOps use cases include:
- Provide ITOps reporting and analytics
- Consolidate IT tools
- Visibility into data and application health
- Unify siloed teams
- Support hybrid cloud architecture
Provide ITOps reporting and analytics
AIOps brings together incident information from different monitoring tools so that ITOps teams can optimize incident management workflows using a data-driven approach. AIOps platforms unify ITOps analytics, performance dashboards, KPI tracking, and more. This use case enhances ITOps risk management by creating custom KPI dashboards for improved service reliability, availability, and ROI demonstration.
AIOps platforms can report and analyze a wide range of KPIs, including MTTx metrics, MTBF, hotspots, resolution metrics, compression and enrichment rates, event compression trends, team and individual performance metrics, L1 resolution rate, service availability metrics, and more, which you can learn more about in our incident management KPI page.
Consolidate IT tools
Tools help IT teams monitor computing environments, including infrastructure and applications, aiming for system reliability and performance. Yet, as enterprises update and acquire capabilities, tool proliferation occurs. It’s not rare for enterprises to use up to 15 monitoring tools, leading to fragmentation. This tool surge adds to IT complexity, resulting in technical debt and overlapping functionalities in some tools.
AIOps platforms overcome these challenges by ingesting data from different observability, change, and topology tools. AIOps layers share incident insights across ITSM, ticketing, on-call, chat, and runbook tools. This unifies fragmented tools and can make redundancy apparent, enabling the organization to consolidate the number of tools in use. Tools rationalization also helps simplify IT systems.
Visibility into data and application health
AIOps aggregates and enriches data from multiple sources using various data collection methods and advanced analytical techniques. This holistic approach allows it to provide a comprehensive view of your IT environment, offering real-time insights into the health and performance of mission-critical services and applications.
Unify siloed teams
Enterprises have groups managing their computing environments, from centralized ITOps to distributed DevOps and SRE teams. Often, these teams stick to specific monitoring tools, leading to information silos and reduced tool value. This lack of shared context can slow incident response and erode inter-team trust.
AIOps applications consolidate this data, fostering swift and consistent collaboration on incidents to provide a unified, richer, and more contextualized view of the organization’s systems to put siloed teams on the same page.
Support hybrid cloud architecture
Enterprises often operate complex architecture, including private, public, and on-premises data centers. An AIOps platform combines tools and teams managing different environments. This then enables users to connect hybrid cloud and on-premises architectures through a consolidated view. Topology data further enables teams to find the source of an issue wherever it may be in the organization’s architecture.
Business AIOps use cases
Business use cases for AIOps include reducing IT team workloads, optimizing IT cost management, ensuring robust performance and SLAs, and propelling development speed and agility. Explore how AIOps is a strategic lever for modern enterprises to navigate their IT challenges effectively. Business AIOps use cases include:
- Reduce alert volume and workload for IT teams
- Improve cost optimization
- Improve performance and SLAs
- Enhance development velocity and business agility
Reduce alert volume and workload for IT teams
Event correlation and automated response reduce workload for ITOps teams. By cutting alert volume by more than 90%, AIOps enables organizations to manage growth in data, scale, and incident volumes without needing more people. Here are other ways to reduce alert volume and workloads:
- Automated workflows: Automated workflows in AIOps streamline incident management, enhancing scalability and efficiency. By automating ticketing, notifications, and custom workflows while providing business context, AIOps aids in early incident detection, preventing costly SLA breaches.
- L1 resolutions: Enriched incident data empowers Level One (L1) engineers to resolve more issues independently without escalating them to higher-cost teams, reducing escalations and focusing higher-cost teams on critical projects.
- Productivity analytics: Additionally, productivity analytics enable NOC directors and managers to track team, site, and shift performance, identifying opportunities for best practice sharing, process optimization, and improved shift assignments.
Improve cost optimization
With the increasing adoption of application services, it’s easy for resource consumption to get out of control. AIOps gives you control and visibility over your IT resources and visibility into which of your many monitoring tools are necessary for incident management. This visibility lets you cut redundant tools and services to optimize your IT spending while meeting your operational needs.
Improve performance and SLAs
IT infrastructure is a crucial enabler for businesses, profitability, and customer service, which depend on strong technology performance. ITOps leaders must ensure service availability, system performance, and positive user experiences by keeping revenue-generating services running.
AIOps tools can reduce MTTR by over 50% and help meet performance objectives. It does this by swiftly identifying and addressing the root causes of incidents, improving user experience, and ensuring timely system restoration, all while optimizing legacy tool management and ensuring SLA compliance. These capabilities lead to faster incident resolution, reduced outages, and an overall boost in system performance and customer transaction continuity.
Enhance development velocity and business agility
Enterprises aiming for digital transformation often wrestle with alert overload, slow incident management, and bottlenecks. AIOps automates workflows and root cause analysis, empowers L1 engineers, and frees high-value L3 and Dev teams for innovation.
AIOps also aligns with modern architecture and hybrid environments, vital for initiatives like microservices and containerization, addressing challenges posed by traditional incident management tools in cloud and hybrid settings.
Examples of AIOps use cases in different industries
AIOps holds immense versatility not just in its use cases but also with the vast array of industry and vertical use cases it supports. Here are some AIOps examples:
- Retail: For a retailer, AIOps can correlate data from monitoring tools with successful or failed customer purchases (in-store and online) to demonstrate how IT problems affect transactions and revenue.
- Gaming: For a gaming company, AIOps can expand into correlating monitoring tool alerts with the usage of their system and players’ ability to buy digital goods.
- Travel: For a travel company, AIOps can correlate booking volume and transactions with system event and performance health indicators.
- Brokerage: For an online brokerage and trading platform, AIOps can connect trading volumes, customer satisfaction, and latency.
From financial institutions optimizing their IT operations to retail companies understanding how IT issues affect their bottom line, AIOps solutions offer tailored options for streamlining processes, reducing downtime, and improving overall efficiency across diverse sectors.
Transform ITOps performance with AIOps
AIOps has numerous use cases that revolutionize traditional IT operational models, eliminate silos, and streamline processes. If you’re building a business case for investing in AIOps and want to explore your company’s AIOps use cases, take a self-guided tour of the BigPanda Operational Intelligence and Automation platform, or better yet, try our personalized demo. Discover how AIOps can reduce your IT operational costs, improve availability, reduce MTTR, and rapidly increase your business agility.
