Webinar: Real talk — Automation for ITOps

IT operations move fast. If you’re an ITOps leader, you need to be moving just as fast to make sure your team has what it needs. Positioning your team for success isn’t easy: complexity in IT is increasing every year and can reach a point where it exceeds a person’s capacity to keep pace. In the face of massive growth, ITOps teams can face major challenges with productivity, burnout and efficiency. But if you’d like to scale your organization, you do have options to avoid bad outcomes. There’s a lot of potential avenues to take to scale your ITOps, including automation.

Automation makes all the difference.
In this webinar, you’ll hear from Waste Management’s Udo Strick about how his company used automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to conquer ITOps challenges. Craig Ginsberg from Cisco AppDynamics and our very own VP of Product Marketing Mohan Kompella led the discussion.

Benefits of automation

Automation, when implemented correctly, can completely transform your ITOps. With BigPanda, you can reduce your alert noise by integrating different tools serving unique functions in order to deliver a unified view of what is happening in your organization. When your team has a unified view, they have a contextual understanding of those alerts. BigPanda can automatically differentiate between what can be considered “noise” and other higher priority alerts that your ITOps team needs to handle. BigPanda can also predict whether a seemingly minor alert might compound into a bigger problem. With more of a heads up for taking care of alerts, your team can be proactive—and thus avoid outages.

So what are some of the main benefits of automation? It can give your team a “set it and forget it” mindset, allowing them to handle other more complex tasks or have more time for innovation rather than putting out small fires that would be better handled by automation. However, successful automation depends on proper integration of various tools and systems. Systems have to work together in a seamless fashion in order for automation to be effective.

Another benefit of automation is automated maintenance plans that reduce alerts and help bring clarity to noise. And lastly, one of the biggest benefits of automation is time savings. Saving one team member 30 seconds of their day per alert doesn’t seem like a lot, but when it’s multiplied exponentially over hundreds of alerts, it adds up—and makes a huge difference for your team.

The roles of BigPanda and AppDynamics

With BigPanda and AppDynamics in your arsenal, your journey to automation through ML and AI can be a successful one. In Waste Management’s case, full automation worked best for them. They wanted every stage of the ITOps process—from notification to solution—to be doing its own analysis to contribute to the success of the team.

If you think about the steps data goes through before action is taken by your team as a chain, each of the solutions within the chain need to contribute something important and work in sync. As two links of the chain, BigPanda and AppDynamics have allowed for massive efficiencies within Waste Management’s process. If you’re looking to achieve full-stack observability, BigPanda in conjunction with AppDynamics can help get you there. Full-stack observability gives you insight into performance across the stack as well as cross-domain correlation.

Useful metrics with automation

At Waste Management, they look at four main metrics for automation. The first is mean time to detection (MTTD), which is the time it takes BigPanda to receive the event. Since they are fully automated, detection is almost immediate—and they’re near the zero mark on this metric. Next, they track mean time to notification (MTTN) and mean time to notification (MTTN). These metrics report the time it takes before the notification chain is initiated and, more importantly, the time it takes for someone to reply to the notification system claiming the ticket. With mean time to recovery (MTTR), they get the full picture of when the event first happened and when a solution was implemented. Waste Management is now in an efficiency range of 80% to 90%. All of these steps have to work together in order to improve efficiency.

Learn how to get started with AIOps today

Click here to watch our self-guided demo to learn more about AIOps, some of the common issues organizations encounter and how to get started.