Published in Telecom Reseller October 2020
Network service management may be assigned to the IT staff but it is fundamental to the digital transformation of most businesses. Poor service is seen by the business’ customers as a measure of the quality of the products and services delivered. Therefore the C-level executives will need to ensure good service management promotes the growth and performance of the digital transformation initiatives. Introducing AIOps is part of the solution to bolster the performance of unified communications (UC).
AIOps for IT operations
Gartner defines AIOps as follows: AIOps combines big data and machine learning to automate IT operations processes, including event correlation, anomaly detection, and causality determination.
AIOps is the application of AI to network operations. AIOps simplifies network operations management, accelerates problem resolution, and automates responses. AIOps can also be applied to service management and the data collected by associated processes.
How AIOps helps
AIOps can diagnose root causes and report them to IT, and may automatically resolve the issues without human intervention, such as removing the humans from operational processes, only informing network staff when the event(s) require manual intervention. This reduces the number of operational personnel and lowers cost.
AIOps is continually learning to improve the handling of future problems. It separates event alerts from the noise, focusing on the problems that need to be addressed. AIOps will identify the problem root causes and recommend solutions. Responses will be automated whenever possible including real-time proactive resolution. AIOps applies focused analytics and machine learning capabilities.
AIOps uses big data to aggregate separated IT operations data in one place such as:
- Event and performance data
- Streaming real-time operations events
- Logs and metrics
- Network data
- Incident-related data and ticketing
AIOps can automatically generate trouble tickets removing manual and non-automated processes. It can locate the root cause of an issue and fix it. The AI collected data can present trends that allow the operational team to be proactive.
On-premise or in the cloud
Where should the AIOps reside? It could go either way, cloud or on-premise. Artificial intelligence thrives on data. The cloud can collect and process more data than an on-premise solution. The more data, the more credible are the results. An organization can manage its own network but it is limited in the amount of data that can be collected and processed by on-premise AI. The necessary data collected will take time to generate good AI results. Unfortunately, networks change so by the time enough data is collected, the network environment is modified. AI can be applied on a global scale by implementing service management for a number of separate customer networks in a cloud service. There is enough data rapidly collected by the AI delivering results that are very current.
Virsae’s Virsae Service Management (VSM) platform collects billions of data points every day that are necessary for AIOps success. Through AIOps, the organization learns about its own network but also can compare itself to many other networks and learn from their problems and solutions. An organization can gain insights that are not possible when just managing their own network without VSM. The use of cloud based AI delivers the best of both worlds, individual and global views. The AI results provided are more credible and accurate.
Beneficiaries; enterprises and MSPs
VSM understands the customer’s configuration is key to its success. Their use of AIOps and auto-discovery processes work in exactly the same way as an experienced engineer. They use the same interfaces and run the same commands. VSM uses AI to analyze the returned data. This automated process runs at a pace that humans simply can’t. Within 12 hours, VSM can discover every asset, every piece of hardware and software — versions, serial numbers, IP addresses, MAC addresses, and physical locations.
The enterprise or MSP customer will receive better service, faster problem resolution, and greater visibility into their network operations. The customers of VSM reacted to the COVID-19 WFH rush by downloading their network reports up to 25 times more frequently than before COVID-19 struck. They learned in real-time how their networks performed but also saw automated and rapid problem resolution.