IT operations analytics is a group of practices and processes to monitor systems in order to gather, process, analyze, and interpret data from IT operations to guide decisions and manage risks.
This artificial intelligence-powered analytics process gives you actionable insights in near-real time so you can detect, fix, and prevent operational issues with IT applications and infrastructure. By using automation, these tools can help an organization make sense of the information generated by daily IT operations and apply the insights to improve processes’ agility.
Companies today generate massive amounts of data from their daily operations, and this data can be used for multiple purposes. You can gather data from monitoring resource usage, operating system functions, network and applications logging, and then use it to improve operational efficiency and optimize the usage of IT resources.
Operational analytics combines data analysis, business intelligence, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to optimize processes. It allows organizations to make data-driven decisions, ultimately lowering costs and improving the bottom line.
There are five types of analytics technologies:
Many companies are using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to improve operations because IT operations analytics (ITOA) tools can simplify day-to-day IT Ops.
Integrating IT Operational Analytics gives organizations an organized way to improve efficiency. By implementing ITOA practices and tools, companies can streamline processes, thus reducing cycle time and costs.
Organizations usually gather data for compliance or reporting purposes. Still, many companies don’t yet understand the importance of leveraging operational data. Every operation contains a gold mine of useful information that, if analyzed, can provide pinpoint detail over productivity, efficiency, security, and many more applications.
Integrating ITOA practices and tools means taking a proactive approach, monitoring and analyzing operations data to detect and identify bottlenecks and problematic patterns before they stall operations.
ITOA also enhances security. Let’s say you are under a DDoS (Distributed Denial of service) attack. Finding the root cause quickly is key to stopping it. An ITOA tool can give you visibility over the entire environment to spot changes and identify the vulnerability that gave way to the attack. IT operations analytics can also help prevent threats because it can detect potential vulnerabilities in the system, allowing you to fix them before an attacker can exploit them.
ITOA software can be provided on premises or via a cloud provider. The tool gathers and analyzes all the data from disparate live running sources, including log, agent, and wire data. For instance, it collects data from operating systems, hypervisors, applications, databases, network devices, and the web. ITOA uses Big Data principles to extract, correlate, combine, and analyze data to derive useful insights under data-driven monitoring practices.
So, how do ITOA tools work? These artificial intelligence-powered tools monitor the entire system, collecting information from disparate IT operations sources such as wire data, agent data, machine data (event logs), and transactional operations. Next, the tool stores and indexes the data in a data store.
The next step involves processing, normalizing, and turning the data into useful information. The software creates a baseline, learning what is normal for the system or environment, then combining and correlating different data sets to detect abnormal patterns.
Finally, the tool sends alerts with recommendations on the issues it found.
This provides organizations with a heads-up over operations, enabling them to diagnose, prioritize, and resolve issues quickly and efficiently. ITOA tools leverage automation to solve low-level or common problems, saving time and effort from IT Ops.
Common applications for ITOA systems are:
Since ITOA as a technology is still growing, there is no “common core of features” for all vendor offerings. However, there are some desirable features to look for that will make your work easier:
Analyzing operational data can be extremely helpful in order to acquire actionable information for data-driven decisions. ITOA tools gather, compare, correlate, and analyze operational data from disparate sources - live and logged - to detect potential issues and recommend solutions.
Some of the benefits of implementing ITOA tools and practices include:
IT Operation Management teams can then leverage ITOA tools to:
