How to get quick value from an AIOps platform

As I’m training for a marathon, I’ve learned that establishing a strong aerobic foundation is the most important first step. Aerobic strength is crucial for improving the body’s efficiency in using oxygen, strengthening the heart and lungs, and increasing stamina and recovery ability.

Similarly, implementing AIOps and achieving maturity starts with building a solid event-management foundation. AIOps encourages visibility and collaboration, reducing silos so your teams can quickly identify essential and actionable alerts from observability data, proactively prevent incidents, and automate incident response steps to resolve issues before outages occur. This enables teams to respond to incidents quickly and advance through the maturity cycle, gaining more benefits as they go.

Starting a major project is a daunting prospect. Whether preparing to run 26.2 miles or implementing a transformative digital strategy, you may ask yourself, “Where do I start?” and “Am I ready?”

How about now? Maybe you feel like your data isn’t organized or ready for AIOps. Or you’re concerned about your team’s bandwidth. Recent platform developments make it easier than ever to start implementing AIOps. And you can realize value quickly, achieving measurable gains in operational efficiency and service availability in only a few weeks.

Building a Foundation: Event Management

The first phase involves setting up event management. Reducing alert noise and establishing a solid base are crucial, yet many organizations struggle to set up event management. With the best-in-class BigPanda platform, you can quickly unify disparate IT data sources, reduce noise, and create a stream of actionable alerts.

“Being able to take highly enriched, highly contextualized alerts and turn them into much fewer and much more actionable incidents was really transformational for us.”

Jon Moss
Head of Edge Software Engineering, Zayo

Many organizations are reluctant to start their AIOps journey due to past struggles with event management.

Quick strides to value

In the past, establishing strong event management required significant time and effort. And, once set up, it was hard to demonstrate value. Organizations invested heavily in developers to set up hundreds of manual data-ingestion and correlation rules. These rules were unsustainable and ineffective at filtering noise, delaying time to value.

With BigPanda, you can set up event management quickly using more than 50 standard integrations to popular monitoring and observability tools. With the intuitive, easy-to-use Open Integration Hub, you can also ingest events using APIs or email from custom integrations. Using quick inbound ingestion, you can:

• Standardize and normalize events and alerts from multiple sources into a single, consistent format
• Reduce alert noise
• Achieve quick wins like tool rationalization and increased visibility

The coach you never had

Technology is only part of the equation. Gaining buy-in for new processes and technologies is challenging. ITOps teams often struggle to hire and retain IT professionals due to unsustainable workloads. And moving through the phases of AIOps maturity benefits from expertise in organizational change management.

Implementing new technology is much more than installing software and pressing the power button. BigPanda has a dedicated team of experts to guide you through the AIOps maturity journey. Our professional services team, solution architects, and partners have helped enterprises across industries — including major banks, healthcare providers, and airlines — reach AIOps maturity while maintaining high service availability. We’ve developed best practices and a step-by-step approach to building a solid foundation, guiding teams through change, and achieving higher maturity levels.

Embracing imperfect data

Lastly, organizations are reluctant to jump into event management due to the “messiness” of their data. On average, organizations have more than 20 data sources, outdated CMDBs, and hundreds of correlation patterns. Much of the data is just noise; cleaning it is very resource-intensive.

AI has changed the game. You no longer need tidy, refined data. AI allows you to achieve more significant results faster with less manual effort. BigPanda Alert Intelligence can ingest multiple data sources — refined or not — then normalize, deduplicate, suppress, enrich, and filter alerts into a centralized view.

“When adopting BigPanda AIOps, organizations typically start with two to five data sources to establish initial visibility, then expand to more sources while reducing noise and creating a single source of truth.“Don’t wait to start your AIOps journey once you are overwhelmed with alerts. Start early to get a single pane of glass to understand which monitoring tools you really need.”

Sanjay Chandra
Vice President of IT, Lucid Motors

Take the first steps to AIOps maturity

It’s best to start your journey to AIOps maturity now. You don’t need perfect data to begin the journey. AIOps from BigPanda can help you establish a strong foundation with effective event management. Our platform delivers quick value without requiring refined data; on average, our proof of value engagements start with just 2 to 4 data sources and can show results within weeks. BigPanda’s expert team is here to guide you through the entire maturity cycle.

Next steps

Download the “A practical guide to AIOps maturity” e-book to explore the four phases of AIOps maturity.