AIOps – Trick or Treat?

2 min read

AIOps, as the term suggests, is Artificial Intelligence for IT operations and was first introduced by Gartner last year. AIOps systems are used to enhance and automate a broad range of processes and tasks in IT operations with the help of big data analytics, machine learning, and other AI technologies.

In its report, Gartner estimated that, by 2020, approximately 50% of enterprises will be actively using AIOps platforms to provide insight into both business execution and IT Operations. AIOps has seen a fairly fast growth since its introduction with many big companies showing interest in AIOps systems. For instance, last month Atlassian acquired Opsgenie, an incident management platform that along with planning and solving IT issues, helps you gain insight to improve your operational efficiency. The reasons why AIOps is being adopted by companies are: it eliminates tedious routine tasks, minimizes costly downtime, and helps you gain insights from data that’s trapped in silos.

Where AIOps can go wrong?

AIOps alerts us about incidents beforehand, but in some situations, it can also go wrong. In cases where the event is unusual, the system will be less likely to predict it. Also, those events that haven’t occurred before will be entirely outside the ability for machine learning to predict or analyze. Additionally, it can sometimes give false negatives and false positives. False negatives could happen in the cases where the tests are not sensitive enough to detect possible issues. False positives can be the result of incorrect configuration. This essentially means that there will always be a need for human operators to review these alerts and warnings.

Is AIOps a trick or treat?

AIOps is bringing more opportunities for IT workforce such as AIOps Data Scientist, who will focus on solutions to correlate, consolidate, alert, analyze, and provide awareness of events. Dell defines its Data Scientist role as someone who will “contribute to delivering transformative AIOps solutions on their SaaS platform”. With AIOps, IT workforce won’t just disappear, it will evolve. AIOps is definitely a treat because it reduces manual work and provides an intuitive way of incident response.