Best IT Operations Analytics

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:

1. Root cause analysis: Helps pinpoint unknown root causes of system behavior problems.
2. Problem assignment: Provides insights on how these problems may be resolved.
3. Service impact analysis: Enables organizations to determine the potential impact of the issues so they can be fixed in the most timely and effective way.
4. Control of service performance and availability: Predicts the state of the system and how the issues can affect performance.
5. Application behavior learning in real time: Correlates and compares the behavior of applications, creating a baseline for future comparisons.

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:

• Establishes a baseline: The tool should be able to analyze historical data and establish what is normal for the system, network, or environment as a baseline for future comparison.
• Provides automated log analysis and predictive analysis: Including machine-learning-based automated behavior analysis to derive insights from past events and predict when such problems may happen in the future.
• Enables cross-domain collection and reporting: The ITOA tool can search, gather, and analyze live and logged data from disparate sources, including multiple environments such as on-premises and cloud.
• Easy to set up and use: In this fast-paced digital world, ITOA software that takes weeks to set up is not very useful. It must be easy to install in order to get quick operational advantages. Additionally, the system should be easy to use, with clear and customizable dashboards that enable full visibility.
• Grows with your business: If the volume of your operations increases, the ITOA tool should be able to handle the increased workload without downtime.

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:

• Detecting, troubleshooting and predicting problems in IT Operations. The system simplifies and automates the finding and fixing of common operational issues.
• Optimizes IT service performance. It gives a broad view of operations by analyzing data from various sources within the business.
• Collects and monitors logs and running data for abnormalities, enabling them to be fixed in real-time.

IT Operation Management teams can then leverage ITOA tools to:

• Solve issues quickly and efficiently.
• Have references to previous problem resolutions that can be optimized in future cases.
• Save time and effort by automating low-level troubleshooting.
• Have an encompassing view of the state of the system operations in terms of efficiency, productivity and security.