AIOps to Help You Unlock the Value of DevOps

Enterprises have been investing in DevOps for over a decade in the form of different toolsets and platforms, but most have had difficulty realizing benefits from their investments. In this blog post, I will help you understand how investing in an enterprise-grade AIOps platform can help enterprises unlock value from DevOps investments.

How Enterprises are Invested in DevOps Today

Today, most enterprises operating at scale have scattered DevOps investments with each underlying product or solution team having their own philosophy and understanding of DevOps. This results in teams implementing their own understanding of DevOps and choosing to implement only a part of the DevOps lifecycle to serve their immediate need. Thus, the enterprise invests in a plethora of DevOps tooling and achieves operational automation in silos. For most, the DevOps adoption is limited to the Code, Build, Test, and Deploy automation in an integrated fashion while Plan, Operate, and Monitor related tooling and automation exists in isolation.

Why Enterprises Are Unable to Achieve ROI on Their DevOps Investments

Even after investing and evangelizing DevOps for years, many enterprises are still unable to realize the full value out of their DevOps investment and efforts. The reason for this can be condensed into four buckets:

1. DevOps culture isn’t adopted organization-wide.    
2. DevOps infrastructure isn’t standardized across the board.
3. The operations team isn’t integrated with DevOps.
4. Operations and monitoring aren’t integrated into the DevOps lifecycle.

The first three buckets – DevOps culture adoption, enterprise standardization, and operations buy-in – ensure the right execution, adoption, and sustainability. However, the value of DevOps investment can only be fully obtained when Operations and Monitoring are integrated, proactive and automated, and function seamlessly with your entire DevOps lifecycle.

How AIOps Can Be Part of the DevOps Lifecycle

Today, in most enterprises, AIOps and DevOps are treated as two different lifecycles instead of a single lifecycle. This makes it very difficult to implement an effective automation strategy because there is no ongoing feedback loop post-deployment.

Figure 1: Most enterprises treat AIOps and DevOps as two different lifecycles resulting in no ongoing feedback loop post-deployment.

AIOps comes into the picture once the DevOps phases like Code, Build, Test, and Deploy get executed and the workload gets deployed into production.

When the workload is in production, the application and the infrastructure on which it is deployed needs to be monitored. This is done with the help of logs and metrics data collected and automated insights from machine learning algorithms to ensure the desired performance and availability are maintained.

The insights generated by these algorithms can be in the form of forecasts, alarms, and analytics. Alarms can act as an input for the DevOps pipeline. This input can be used to either create tickets or trigger an automation workflow.

How AIOps Input Makes the DevOps Pipeline Intelligent

The standalone DevOps pipeline provides automation but doesn’t have any intelligence built into it to take corrective actions based upon the functioning of the deployment infrastructure or the deployed workloads. This is because it is dependent on human inputs to take action.    

Thus the entire investment of time and money in DevOps pipelines looks inconclusive. Observability, insight, and action remain in silos. Observations cannot be converted into insight, and then into action in an automated fashion.

These insights would be in form of alarms based on the observability data such as logs and metrics. These alarms in turn can be converted into:

1. Either a ticket that results in a code change and finally ends up in a DevOps pipeline for deployment, or
2. The alarm directly triggers appropriate remediation to be executed.

This would automate the process of observability to action by having human intervention only when required – making the DevOps pipeline intelligent.

Figure 2: Integrating AIOps with DevOps automates observability making the DevOps pipeline intelligent.

How Integrating AIOps and DevOps Helps Enterprises Achieve Operational Excellence

Integrating AIOps and DevOps provides an enterprise with observability, insight, and action. It helps the enterprise achieve operational excellence resulting in a better experience for end-users.

The key performance indicators critical for tracking operational excellence are: 

• Reduced Mean Time to Repair: Integrated AIOps and DevOps systems provide stakeholders with a standard process that reduces the time it takes to identify the issue’s root cause and triage the issue.
• Improved System Availability: Automating the Observability, Insight, and Action process leads to faster identification of failures and their cause which equates to future improved system availability.

How Broadcom Can Help

Broadcom offers integrated enterprise-class AIOps and DevOps solutions that help our customers achieve operational excellence. Broadcom’s AIOps platform has best in class Application, Infrastructure, and Network observability solutions like DX Application Performance Management, DX Unified Infrastructure Management, and DX NetOps respectively. The platform also includes DX Operational Intelligence for machine learning-based operational insight along with Automic for DevOps automation.

An integrated AIOps and DevOps platform can accelerate your pace towards operational excellence, and if you are getting both these platforms integrated out of the box, then it is just that much easier.

Cheers!

Learn more about Broadcom’s approach to AIOps and DevOps integration on our Enterprise Software Academy.