Service Now on Using AIOps to Prevent Outages

IBM Explains AIOps

Yet Another Definition of "Platform"

According to a survey sponsored by CircleCI and Puppet, DevOps and platforms go hand in hand. The survey of 2400 information technology professionals globally looked at “platform models,” defined in yet another way. 

And though many looking at AIOps might consider the use of external computing-as-a-service resources a primary driver of need for AIOps, the survey takes a different approach, limiting “platform” to internal resources only. 

As always, the definition of “platform” really does matter. 

source: CircleCI 

“Broadly speaking, the platform team provides the infrastructure, environments, deployment pipelines and other internal services that enable internal customers — usually application development teams — to build, deploy and run their applications,” the study states.

Likewise, “a digital platform is a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, knowledge and support which are arranged as a compelling internal product,” says Evan Bottcher, Thoughtworks Australia head of engineering.  

The report uses the term "internal platform" to mean one that's been built by and for the organization. So AWS or other IaaS offerings would not be thought of as "platforms” in this context.

“In our survey, we defined platform teams as those that are responsible for maintaining a self-service platform other teams use to build and deliver applications or services,” CircleCI says.

41% of Surveyed U.K. IT Staffs Investing in AIOps in 2021

As some observers note,  if all an enterprise is doing is monitoring bare-metal servers and networks in its own data center, “you can probably keep on using your legacy monitoring tools.”

Cloud computing, most would agree, changes matters. Applications running virtually, using cloud service providers plus in-house resources require a new set of monitoring tools. 

In 2021, U.K. technology executives have prioritized information technology operations management  tool investments such as hybrid infrastructure monitoring (51 percent), AIOps (48 percent), and cloud native observability (47 percent). Digital experience monitoring (46 percent) and Application performance monitoring (46 percent) tools are right behind, says OpsRamp, citing research by McKinsey Global. 

source: OpsRamp 

“Siloed tools have historically created problems for hybrid infrastructure management as they offer limited context for assessing the health and performance of an IT service,” says OpsRamp. “Our survey shows AIOps (48 percent) is a focus area for tools consolidation, though it trails network performance monitoring (56 percent) and hybrid infrastructure monitoring (54 percent).”

IBM Buys Turbonomic for Hybrid Cloud AIOps

IBM is acquiring Turbonomic, an application resource management (ARM) and network performance management (NPM) software provider based in Boston, Mass. 

IBM says the acquisition will make it “the only company that will be able to provide customers with AI-powered automation capabilities that span from AIOps (the use of AI to automate IT operations) to application and infrastructure observability, all built on Red Hat OpenShift to run across any hybrid cloud environment.” 

The acquisition will provide businesses with “full stack application observability and management” of containers, virtual machines, servers, storage, networks, and databases, IBM says, while also providing such value at lower cost in hybrid cloud environments. 

The acquisition complements IBM's recent acquisition of Instana for application performance monitoring (APM) and observability, and the launch of IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps to automate IT Operations using AI. 

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