Transforming IT Service Management with AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations)

Co-authored by leading Platinum Atlassian solution partner iZeno and Atlassian solution experts.

As applications evolve from monolithic to microservices and IT infrastructure grows in size and complexity, the challenge of providing effective management and maintenance is intensifying for overburdened IT teams. An over reliance on traditional, manual IT processes can result in inefficiencies, missed opportunities for innovation, and potential gaps in security and compliance. But automation methods like AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) can streamline IT processes while enabling more reliable, secure, and efficient management and maintenance.

AIOps defined

AIOps integrates artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and automates many of the manual detection and maintenance tasks that can consume an IT team’s time. AIOps streamlines and improves the efficiency of IT operations, empowering IT teams to proactively analyze data from multiple sources, rapidly identify areas that need attention within the environment, and gain accurate insights for quick and effective issue resolution. With AIOps, IT professionals have more time to focus on strategic, high-value initiatives.

Key drivers of AIOps

AIOps is a valuable solution for organizations experiencing any of the following conditions:

Environment complexity: When organizations transition from a monolithic architecture to a microservices-based service architecture while embracing cloud-native principles, their technology stack takes on a level of complexity that's difficult for IT teams with manual processes to monitor and track.
A need for availability and real-time monitoring: Organizations that want to ensure their services exhibit reliability, responsiveness, and scalability can benefit from AI, which provides exceptional user experiences and helps organizations fulfill their SLAs (service level agreements) while promptly addressing issues.
High data volume: Within a microservices-based architecture, growing demands for availability and monitoring drive an increase in data volume. AI empowers operations and IT teams to proficiently analyze data and make informed decisions when it comes to anomaly detection and clustering techniques.
A desire for an improved customer experience: AI allows organizations to achieve faster issue resolution with a minimal impact on users, ensuring a seamless experience.
Cost burdens: AIOps can lead to significant cost savings by optimizing resource utilization and reducing the need for additional staff. AI can prevent or minimize downtime, automate routine tasks, enhance capacity planning, and support the automated scaling of infrastructure as needed.

AIOps components

The key components of an AIOps platform are often summarized as: observe, engage, act. The AIOps framework's Observe, Engage, Act approach offers a straightforward way for IT service management teams to enhance their operations.

Observe

IT teams can use AIOps to collect and analyze vast amounts of data from various sources within their organization's IT environment. These sources may include logs, metrics, events, and other telemetry data from servers, applications, network devices, and more.

Engage

AIOps facilitates the correlation of data across various sources to provide a holistic understanding of incidents and their potential impact on the organization.

Intelligent alerting and notification systems are an integral part of this component. They ensure IT teams are informed promptly about critical issues that require attention using IT service management solutions with modern incident management capabilities. Using workflow automation, AIOps platforms can route incidents to the appropriate teams or systems for resolution, and they can track the progress of these workflows.

Act

AIOps platforms execute automated or semi-automated actions based on the insights derived from the observation and engagement phases. These actions can include automated remediation, where AIOps can trigger predefined scripts or actions to resolve common issues without the need for human intervention.

The ultimate aim of AIOps is to accelerate incident response, reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), and improve the overall efficiency of IT operations.

AIOps: an end-to-end solution

When organizations adopt AIOps, they secure an end-to-end solution with three phases that map onto the observe, engage, act framework.

Observability (observe)

With AIOps, IT teams have access to supervised and unsupervised machine learning capabilities for all forms of data including logs, traces, events, and metrics, for both the business as a whole and for operations within the organization.

For faster investigation and correlation, teams can aggregate logs in a central location.

The following types of log data should be included in an AIOps platform:

Application performance monitoring (APM): Implement APM to gain insights about application performance, dependencies, and code optimization, and to identify the root cause of issues.
Infrastructure monitoring: Implement infrastructure monitoring, including cloud platforms, to collect logs, metrics, and other data for faster troubleshooting. Tools with out-of-the-box machine learning preconfigured rules for anomalies detection are best. Correlate the application and infrastructure data to break down the silo and speed up the root case detection.
Log monitoring: Implement centralized logging to unify the application and infrastructure logs. Implement the algorithm to get insights from structured or unstructured data. Implement algorithms to identify common patterns and trends. Out-of-the-box machine learning should be applied to every log message for quick detection and correlation.
Real user monitoring: Implement real user monitoring to collect and measure performance data to analyze the URL, operating system, browser, and location to better understand application performance and for better underlying infrastructure.

Push the observability alerts to the ITSM solution for proactive incident management to avoid any service disruption.

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IT Service Management (engage)

The IT service management, or engage, phase in an AIOps solution orchestrates an organization's incident management process and ensures the right teams are alerted, provided with actionable information, and guided through the resolution process efficiently.

Jira Service Management is an effective way to establish a modern incident management process.

How to use Jira Service Management to establish a modern incident management process:

Pattern and trends-based alerts: AIOps platforms continuously monitor data for patterns and trends. When anomalies or issues are detected, alerts are generated based on these patterns and trends.
Alert notification: Jira Service Management notifies the on-call teams based on the services, platform, and the severity of the alert. Notifications are dispatched through diverse channels, including mobile app push notifications, email, phone calls, SMS, and more. This ensures that the appropriate personnel are notified promptly, which enhances response time.
Automated plan of action: The ITSM platform automatically suggests a plan of action to the on-call team based on the nature of the incident, impacted services, and similar incident occurrences in the past. This helps teams make informed decisions quickly. Utilizing automation, it is possible to associate open incidents with similar characteristics to a central parent incident, effectively reducing administrative overhead.
Service dependency mapping: Assets, which is Jira Service Management's native asset and configuration management tool, provides a visual representation of service dependencies and offers meaningful incident details to help the team understand the context and potential impacts on the broader IT environment.
Collaboration and swarming: Swarming involves bringing together SMEs from different domains to collaborate on resolving an incident efficiently. Jira Service Management offers collaborative "swarming" for teams through integration with platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack. Furthermore, IT teams can facilitate collaboration through built-in video conferencing or by utilizing Zoom.
Runbooks: IT teams are provided with runbooks, or guides, that outline specific actions to take based on the incident's source parameters and expected outcomes. This ensures a systematic approach to incident resolution. Runbooks and other documentation can be created and maintained in the knowledge repository, powered by Confluence and seamlessly integrated with Jira Service Management through its native integration with Confluence.
Change logging: If necessary, teams have the capability to automatically initiate a change request within Jira Service Management, which can then trigger the requisite approvals based on the affected service. This facilitates the monitoring and control of changes essential for incident resolution, ensuring compliance with governance, risk, and compliance standards.
Automatic remediation: When predefined conditions are satisfied, and the incident can be resolved without human involvement, Jira Service Management can trigger automatic remediation actions within the platform through built-in automation or by integrating with external systems to execute cross-platform remediation actions.
Knowledge base and runbooks: Teams can create and update knowledge base articles and runbooks, which are hosted within Confluence. This helps capture institutional knowledge and best practices for future reference. When a playbook is chosen for execution, the platform provides step-by-step guidance for the team during execution, which may entail a series of predefined steps and actions.
Automation runbooks development: If a suitable runbook does not exist, the AIOps platform can trigger a task for the team to develop an automation runbook to address similar incidents in the future. This promotes continuous improvement.

Automation (act)

The automation, or act, phase is an AIOps solution component that focuses on automating actions to resolve issues, improve system stability, and optimize IT operations. This phase leverages predefined conditions and triggers to execute specific tasks automatically, reducing the need for manual intervention and accelerating incident resolution.

See common automation tasks.

Restart a Service: Automatically restart a service or application when it becomes unresponsive or encounters issues. This can help quickly restore service availability without manual intervention.

Clean up logs to free up virtual machine space: As log files accumulate, they can consume disk space on virtual machines (VMs). Log clean up processes, including removing older or unnecessary log entries, can be automated to ensure sufficient storage capacity.

Auto-scale infrastructure resources based on traffic: AIOps can monitor incoming traffic patterns and predict when there will be a surge in demand. When an expected increase in traffic is detected, the system can automatically scale up infrastructure resources, such as CPU and RAM, to handle the additional load.

Conversely, when traffic decreases and resources are no longer needed at their peak capacity, the process of scaling down infrastructure resources can be automated to optimize cost and resource utilization.

Isolate an endpoint based on a security alert or abnormal behavior: When a security alert or abnormal behavior is detected, automated actions can be taken to isolate the affected endpoint or device. This could involve temporarily disconnecting it from the network to prevent further harm or intrusion until the issue is resolved.

Disaster recovery: When certain component failure is detected due any incident, automation can be triggered to enable the disaster recovery site to bring the services back without any major disruption.

Certain automations may require approvals. ITSM helps get the relevant approvals from IT teams or business stakeholders automatically based on defined conditions.

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Recommended best practices

Implementing AIOps requires careful planning and adherence to best practices to ensure its success. Our recommendations include:

Identify the current state: Begin by conducting a thorough assessment of your existing IT infrastructure, tools, and processes. Understand how your IT operations currently function, including monitoring and incident management. This baseline assessment helps you identify areas that can benefit from AIOps and provides a clear starting point for improvements.
Define future objectives: Clearly define your goals and objectives for AIOps implementation. Determine what you want to achieve, such as reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR), improving system availability, or automating routine tasks. These objectives will serve as a roadmap for your AIOps deployment and help measure its success.
Choose the right tool: Select AIOps tools and solutions that align with your organization's specific needs and objectives. Consider factors like scalability, integration capabilities, ease of use, and the ability to analyze and correlate data from various sources, including logs, metrics, and events.
Security controls: When integrating AIOps with other systems, especially for data collection and communication, whitelist the necessary IP addresses to enhance security. This helps prevent unauthorized access and ensures that only trusted sources can interact with your AIOps platform. If you're implementing AIOps for on-premises observability, prioritize security measures by implementing encryption and accessing controls to safeguard your data and systems.
Continual improvement: AIOps is not a one-time implementation; it requires ongoing maintenance and improvement. Continuously monitor the performance of your AIOps platform and refine your algorithms and processes based on feedback and changing IT requirements. This iterative approach ensures that AIOps remains effective in the long term.
Governance and internal reviews: Establish governance mechanisms and conduct regular internal reviews to assess the effectiveness of your AIOps implementation. Ensure that your AIOps initiatives align with the overall IT strategy and business objectives. Regularly engage stakeholders and solicit their feedback to make improvements.

AIOps offers benefits that can contribute to improved IT operations, enhanced efficiency, cost savings, and better overall business outcomes. With real-time monitoring and the analysis of IT infrastructure, applications, and services, AIOps allows organizations to identify and address issues before they impact end-users. AIOps even allows organizations to proactively detect and remediate issues by analyzing historical data and trends, ensuring a seamless end-user experience. AIOps' predictive analytics aid in long-term planning, helping organizations make informed decisions about infrastructure investments and upgrades.

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