How to Reduce Outages: Automated Triage and Remediation with AIOps

Customers today expect the best when it comes to their online experience. And these high expectations have resulted in an increased demand on the business.

Software development organizations must produce solutions that meet the needs of their end users in an intuitive, reliable, and scalable manner. Combine this with an increase in the complexity of the environments these businesses need to manage, and it’s easy to see why it’s so critical for developers and IT personnel to adopt techniques that assist in addressing these challenges.

One of the techniques that is becoming more and more important to organizational success and system reliability is AIOps. Keep reading for an overview of AIOps, the importance of automation in successfully implementing an AIOps strategy, and how DX Operational Intelligence and Automic Automation solutions from Broadcom can help drive the use of AI and machine learning in automated incident remediation.

What is AIOps, and Why is Automation So Important to Its Success?

AIOps refers to artificial intelligence for IT Operations. In other words, AIOps means leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to help ITOps folks better support and maintain the systems relied on by the business and their customers.

Automation is Critical

AIOps is impossible (or, at the very least, significantly limited) without automation. Between monitoring applications, infrastructure, networking components, and more, it would be a futile undertaking to try and analyze and correlate data across these sources to gain real and meaningful insights upon which the organization can act.

Instead, the processes that drive the collection and contextualization of this information must be automated. In doing so, IT operations and development personnel can be made aware of application and system issues in a more timely manner.

Furthermore, in addition to reducing the time to acknowledgment, incident response personnel will already have the insights they need and therefore reduce the amount of time spent determining the root cause and implementing a resolution.

Modern Tooling, Intelligent Recommendations, and Automated Remediation

Advanced automation functionality, powered by AI/ML, provides even greater benefit for triage and remediation processes. In other words, modern AIOps solutions often provide functionality that not only derives useful insights from data that helps simplify the process of root cause analysis but actually automates the process of determining root cause.

These solutions leverage self-learning and heuristic capabilities to provide intelligent recommendations that drive system remediation. And, in some cases, AIOps solutions can leverage data-driven workflows to perform triage and remediation in an efficient and automated manner.

One AIOps solution that features all of the capabilities mentioned above is the DX Operational Intelligence platform (with intelligent automation) from Broadcom.

DX Operational Intelligence and Intelligent Automation: Streamlining Incident Triage and Remediation

Broadcom’s AIOps solution, DX Operational Intelligence, is a single orchestration layer built to monitor and ingest data (both structured and unstructured) from all components of an organization’s digital chain. This data includes logs, metrics, alarms, topology, and more, enabling increased (and centralized) visibility spanning an organization’s entire technology stack.

DX Operational Intelligence takes this data and analyzes it using a machine learning model to produce targeted analytics that provides critical insights to development and IT personnel tasked with the support and maintenance of essential systems. These targeted analytics include analysis of system performance, alarm data analysis, contextualized log data, predictive analysis, and more.

These analytics are then leveraged to help streamline and further automate root cause identification and incident remediation when problems occur.

Integration with Automic Automation

The DX Operational Intelligence platform can be integrated with Automic Automation for AIOps. This integrated solution takes Broadcom’s AIOps capabilities one step further by producing workflows containing recommended actions and (in a variety of cases) providing functionality for remediation process automation when issues are detected. Essentially, the Automic Automation integration closes the circle by automating all operations – from incident detection and root cause analysis through triage and remediation.

Automic Automation has capabilities that support several use cases, including automated service restarts, automation of diagnostic processes (streamlining root cause analysis and enabling faster triage), infrastructure healing, and integration with third-party ticketing systems to improve operational efficiencies in the realm of incident management.

DX Operational Intelligence and Automic Automation Working Together

The DX Operational Intelligence and Automic Automation platforms are designed to work together seamlessly. Let’s take a high-level look at how this integration works to speed issue resolution and boost operational efficiencies.

• Broadcom’s DX Operational Intelligence platform ingests data from across the entire technology stack, centralizing the data for correlation across all components.
• This data is analyzed using machine-learning algorithms to produce targeted analytics that can then be packaged into insightful alarms.
• The recommendation engine then analyzes these alarms to provide real-time, data-driven, and heuristic-based workflows to recommend and automate triage, remediation, or both. This recommendation leverages a supervised ML algorithm that takes user explicit feedback to improve the recommendations continually.
• These workflows are executed to satisfy the alarm raised by DX Operational Intelligence in a time-efficient manner, completing the process and limiting the overall impact that the incident had on the customer.

Wrapping Up

In a world of increasingly complex systems and rising customer expectations, organizations need to leverage solutions that assist in streamlining the processes for issue identification and remediation. Not the least of which are platforms that utilize machine learning algorithms to contextualize data across an organization’s entire digital chain. Broadcom’s DX Operational Intelligence and Automic Automation represent solutions for doing just that.

 With DX Operational Intelligence and Automic Automation, implementing a successful AIOps strategy is more than attainable. In utilizing the platform, IT operations folks can automate root cause analysis and incident remediation, increasing speed to issue resolution while reducing outages and limiting the overall impact that incidents have on end users. With a machine learning model based on heuristics, user feedback, and self-learning, Broadcom provides a solution for intelligent recommendations and automated triage that becomes stronger, more accurate, and more complete as time goes on.

To learn more, read our white paper: How AIOps and Intelligent Automation Fuel Autonomous Remediation.

For more AIOps resources, visit Broadcom’s Enterprise Software Academy.