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:
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.
Forrester defines ITOA as, "The use of mathematical algorithms and other innovations to extract meaningful information from the sea of raw data collected by management and monitoring technologies."
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:
But why else has ITOA taken modern IT operations by storm?
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
The effectiveness of any ITOA tool is determined by the successful integration of features that support the above mentioned applications.
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:
Contact our support team to learn first hand about the features that can make your enterprise network fully observable.
