Introduction to IT Operations Analytics: What it is and why it matters

IT operations (ITOps) refers to the implementation, management, delivery, and support of IT services to an organization. ITOps help organizations maintain and operate all the technological tools required to keep business activities up and running with utmost quality while also keeping the costs down.

A few common ITOps processes are:

• Problem rectification: Analyzing the root cause of incidents and taking preventive measures to keep them from occurring again.
• Access management: A set of procedures used to track and monitor the access management solutions for authenticating a user's access to a particular application.
• Service desk support: All the support services, including managing the ticketing system.
• Efficiently managing IT infrastructure: Always seeking to optimize and improve the infrastructure while safely managing the IT workloads.

Every organization sets performance objectives. But, to ensure that their business goals are achieved, organizations must analyze the performance of all the different layers of their network architecture and administrative strategies. This detailed examination of IT business performance led to the coining of the term IT operations analytics (ITOA), and the approach has gained prominence ever since.

ITOA in the IT operations environment

Operational data is critical for understanding the role IT plays in an organization. Operational data, in an IT context, should be viewed as a coalescence of two terms, business and IT operations. This can be deciphered as a situation where a huge amount of data exists and a question arises on how to utilize these data to the benefit of the organization.

IT operations used to be strictly reactive, except for scheduled maintenance operations. But things changed after IT systems became more sophisticated, paving the way for a proactive approach.

This is where ITOA can come in handy for the IT department of an organization. ITOA is a collection of techniques used to analyze the legacy operational data and take action to prevent outages from affecting the ROI of a business organization. The scope of ITOA is huge and pervades through all the essential aspects of a successful IT operation. Its benefits include:

• Improved root cause analysis to know the source of a problem.
• Better utilization of computing resources.
• Minimized outages.

But why else has ITOA taken modern IT operations by storm?

The meteoric rise of ITOA with the help of AIOps

The evolution of artificial intelligence has helped to automate the entire operational workflow of an organization by utilizing machine learning models. Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) not only analyzes past events, but also possess the ability to forecast future events. This AI-enabled process collates data from multiple sources in your environment, understands the correlations, and assists IT teams in managing the data. A tool with the combination of AI and ITOA will have the added advantage of creating a repository of automated workflow policies that can reduce manual intervention and carry out tasks based on pre-decided directives.

The potential of ITOA with AIOps has been defined by the technological research and consulting firm Gartner® in the following list of critical applications.

Gartner's list of ITOA systems applications

1. Root cause analysis: Analyzing the pattern of IT infrastructure with full stack monitoring can help get to the source of the problem afflicting the network.
2. Dynamic thresholds: Benchmarks and baselines are created by studying the various applications and aggregating the data collected. These benchmarks are not static, but change dynamically without any manual intervention as per the changes taking place in the infrastructure patterns.
3. Proactively determining the states of the network: The manner in which the network is going to perform in the future and its impact on the availability can be determined with the analysis of big data.
4. Solving the problems: Easily determine how a problem that arises within a dynamic network can be resolved with minimum disruptions and resource requirements.

The effectiveness of any ITOA tool is determined by the successful integration of features that support the above mentioned applications.

How ITOA is integrated into OpManager plus

OpManager plus boasts a suite of features that efficiently utilize ITOA to ease the day-to-day functioning of your IT department. With OpManager plus, you can:

• Interpret the true nature of a problem plaguing your network by digging down to the source of the problem with the help of the root cause analysis feature.
• Automate the process of setting thresholds for key metrics with adaptive thresholds, while eliminating the need for manual intervention.
• Ensure fine-grained authentication for setting up the appropriate level of authentication for individual users with customizable, role-based access control.
• Establish a relation between infrastructure performance and ROI by using dedicated dashboards for AWS cloud servers, Hyper-V virtual servers, and SAP monitors.
• Use cloud monitoring to analyze resource usage and drastically reduce cloud costs.

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