Managing modern IT environments is becoming more complex and fragmented as organizations rely on a broader range of applications and services, including cloud, hybrid infrastructure, microservices, and legacy systems. This complexity and velocity surpass human capacity and old processes, making it challenging for IT teams to respond efficiently to incidents.
In collaboration with BigPanda, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) recently published a report highlighting the benefits of AIOps for IT operations (ITOps) and IT service management (ITSM) teams. Nearly 55% of the over 300 respondents in the research study reported that they found significant value in AIOps, noting that it saves them at least 10 to 20 minutes per incident. Here are some of the key findings in the report and why AIOps is a game changer for ITOps teams and their counterparts in IT service and incident management.
EMA Research identifies AIOps as key to managing IT complexity
The EMA report emphasizes that “AIOps makes it possible for different teams to work within a shared context. An integrated view of the elements and impacts that matter enables specialization without siloes.” Context is essential for teams delivering IT services, as it helps convert data into actionable insights.
Understanding how an incident affects applications and services is an example of critical context for most teams. However, the study found that 37% of respondents stated that “knowing which services are impacted” consumes a significant amount of time, while 38% indicated that “knowing how to prioritize responses” contributes to slower response times. Additionally, 71% of research panelists reported that looking for additional context constitutes 25% or more of mean time to resolution (MTTR) — with 27% saying it takes up over half that time. Notably, 100% of those experiencing minimal wasted time (10% or less) have mature AIOps in place, showcasing the efficiency gains of AIOps.
AIOps accelerates incident management and improves productivity
AIOps have many positive impacts on the incident response process. The report shows how AIOps slashes resolution times and how AIOps capabilities help teams exceed SLAs. Here are some specific benefits that the report draws attention to:
- Attack MTTR at the source: AIOps decrease an organization’s MTTR by eliminating the most time-consuming tasks during incident workflows and surfacing relevant information to speed up root cause analysis. This improvement enhances service reliability and ensures that core services and applications function at their highest level.
- Be proactive and avoid incidents: AIOps enable organizations to be more proactive and catch incidents before they happen. Reduced downtime conversely means less revenue loss due to outages and overall benefits the bottom line for businesses and their customers.
- Increase employee productivity: Automation and context-rich alerts improve cross-functional awareness and reduce MTTR and incident frequency. This gives employees more time to concentrate on innovation and more impactful projects.
According to a report, the primary metrics used to measure the effectiveness of AIOps include “Reduced MTTR and number of outages” (cited by 38% of respondents) and “Decrease in war room frequency, duration, and number of people involved” (mentioned by 35% of respondents). These findings highlight the importance of AIOps in freeing up employees’ time.
Empower service desk teams with AIOps
AIOps is often misconstrued as benefiting only ITOps teams, but the EMA report highlights how AIOps can improve the lives of service desk agents. Service management teams frequently receive tickets with minimal information, forcing them to investigate the situation or escalate to other teams manually, which leads to poor customer experiences.
Notably, a third of all incidents are initially reported through user and customer complaints made directly to the service desk. Yet, when asked about the level of information the service desk typically possesses regarding an incident, only 12% of panelists rated the quality as “very high.” This rating reflects inadequacies in dependencies, impact, routing, prioritization, possible causes, and recommended remediation steps. Without this information, it is difficult to discern the priority of an incident, which usually results in escalations that send tedious work to L2 and L3 engineers.
AIOps utilizes GenAI to gather relevant data across various IT tools and knowledge bases (i.e., email, chat, historical tickets, and internal documents) and surfaces guiding insights to help throughout the incident workflow. The report cites the most common high-value use cases for GenAI for IT service management teams, including:
- Real-time identification of business context, dependencies, and impact
- Identification and engagement of the right people and resources
- Knowledge-based article creation with ongoing updates.
The report highlights that one of the top improvements AIOps can provide is facilitating cross-functional collaboration between ITOps and service management teams. This collaboration can significantly speed up response times by automating ticket creation. Each ticket contains an accurate summary, impact assessment, and instant identification of the affected services, applications, and users, supplying the service desk with all necessary information and removing the need for manual investigation.
The tangible impacts of AIOps on IT performance
The report contains vital metrics that illustrate the impact of AIOps initiatives. Organizations that successfully implement AIOps can improve service availability, reduce the frequency and duration of outages, and reduce operational costs. Additionally, employees working with AIOps report increased productivity.
These findings align with the real-world benefits seen by Autodesk, a leader in 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software. Autodesk managed over 100,000 monthly alerts from 25 monitoring tools, and its service desk struggled with manual investigation and ticket inefficiencies. Adopting BigPanda enabled them to consolidate alerts into actionable incidents and improve ticketing, resulting in a 69% reduction in incidents and an 85% improvement in MTTR. This shift significantly enhanced operational efficiency and allowed for better detection of anomalies across their environment.
Future-proof IT Operations and IT Service Management (ITSM) with AIOps
Adopting AIOps can benefit ITOps and service management teams in the long term. BigPanda offers the only resilient and scalable AIOps that transforms IT noise into insights and surface siloed knowledge into situational awareness, enabling IT operations and service management teams to achieve high service reliability.
Download EMA’s report, AIOps-powered IT service: insight for action, for more information about:
- How AIOps reduces incident response times and boosts IT productivity.
- Ways AIOps enhances service reliability by preventing outages before they occur.
- The cost-saving benefits of automating manual IT processes with AIOps
