The top three insights from Gartner IOCS 2024
BigPanda was honored to be a premier sponsor of Gartner’s IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference (IOCS) in Las Vegas, Nevada. This event allowed us to showcase the latest BigPanda capabilities, connect with industry leaders, and gain valuable insights into the future of IT operations. For those who couldn’t attend, here are the three most impactful insights from my conversations with the customers, vendors, and analysts at IOCS 2024.
More than ever, observability needs AIOps to be effective
Organizations are searching for solutions to improve visibility into their IT environments and communication across their departments, especially among their observability/ITSM and AI-powered IT operations (AIOps) functions. The main benefit of this convergence is improved operational efficiency, which can allow organizations to get the most out of their tools.
Observability and monitoring tools remain essential, as they provide the raw data needed to reduce alert noise, prioritize alerts, develop full context, and automate incident resolution responses. However, these tools don’t resolve IT incidents on their own. AIOps and AI-powered incident management bridge the critical gap between alerts and action. This capability gap is why more than half of organizations utilize an AIOps platform to maximize the value and impact of their observability investments.
Since no observability or monitoring tool can provide complete visibility across the IT stack, organizations should leverage AIOps to unify those siloed tools. Doing so allows organizations to focus on strategic tasks rather than switching between multiple dashboards and wasting time on manual, time-consuming incident management processes. Many organizations I spoke with at the event consider implementing AIOps to enhance their observability as an essential step for advancing their IT operations. You can learn more about this topic in our blog, How observability and AIOps work better together.
GenAI is proving its value for IT operations
Another recurring theme at IOCS 2024 was the importance of proving the value of generative AI (GenAI) in IT operations. Despite the rapid development of new AI tools, many organizations still need assistance to convert these advancements into real business value.
It can be challenging to advance AI projects from pilot to full production. Significant excitement surrounds these initiatives, driven by the increasing demand for GenAI-powered virtual agents in the infrastructure and operations sector. However, we’ve also heard from analysts that many organizations face challenges related to data quality and process integration when adopting GenAI.
Large Language Models (LLMs) require a clean data set to function correctly. Organizations are still very focused on process integration and understanding how to govern AI for accurate outputs. These processes are still being refined and must be changed to integrate GenAI successfully.
IT operations offer significant opportunities to employ AI to automate routine tasks, provide faster resolutions to typical issues, and predict system failures before they happen. However, at BigPanda, we frequently encounter the misconception that AIOps can automate IT processes immediately upon deployment. Building a solid IT event management foundation is critical before moving on to more advanced AIOps capabilities such as automation. It’s important to remember that there’s an AIOps maturity model that organizations can follow. By following this path, organizations can ensure that they gain tangible business value from their AI investments and capabilities.
BigPanda has a proven methodology to help you get started and eventually achieve automation that follows Gartner’s advice. We recommend selecting a few data sources, configuring those sources correctly, and expanding from there. Building a strong data foundation through correlation and noise reduction lays the groundwork for advanced capabilities like automated root cause analysis. You can learn more about laying this groundwork in our e-book, Achieve quick time to value with AIOps.
Organizations still struggle with overwhelming IT noise
The most common trend I observed is that all IT professionals are trying to adopt a more proactive approach to IT event management. However, almost all of them shared that their organizations are still overwhelmed by IT alert noise.
IT outages can cost large enterprises up to $15,000 per minute, and organizations need solutions to resolve them as quickly as possible. AIOps offers a solution to modern enterprises’ IT challenges, and can help reduce IT noise, streamline incident management, and improve operational efficiency.
If you haven’t attended one of Gartner’s IOCS events, I highly recommend it. You can connect with your peers in the IT operations industry, and learn from experts and analysts about the innovations developing in the space. In the meantime, you can check out the following resources to learn how BigPanda can help transform your IT operations.
