Business leaders talk excitedly about "digital transformation" and "innovative customer experience," but it falls on the shoulders of IT operations to make sure everything actually works. As transformation takes hold, IT teams manage increasingly complex, hybrid, and distributed environments – often comprising traditional on-premises systems and modern infrastructures made up of containers, multiple clouds, and virtualized networks.
Modern environments are often ephemeral and frequently change; the resulting operational data explosion makes it hard to analyze and monitor issues. Moreover, monitoring data are usually generated by a variety of disparate tools, resulting in a high rate of redundancy and further contributing to alarm fatigue.
The challenges don’t stop there. Lacking unified visibility across the hybrid environments, teams are tied down to inspecting different systems to find the root cause of issues. They also end up reacting to problems instead of spotting them early.
Ultimately, the customer experience suffers while triage calls run for minutes or even hours.
AIOps platforms leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to deliver actionable insights that help IT Operations improve business service performance. These platforms enable you to evolve traditional monitoring practices — focused on individual component status — into holistic observability that shows how business services behave and relate to the supporting infrastructure. Indeed, Gartner reports that one-third of companies will adopt observability techniques by 2024.
In this context, Broadcom is excited to announce the latest release of its AIOps platform, DX Operational Intelligence. The new version of the platform primarily focuses on enriching the operator workflows for complex monitoring environments, going deeper into service-driven monitoring, and improving the performance for data processing and analytics.
Here’s what’s new in the latest release of DX Operational Intelligence.
Root cause analysis streamlines problem identification and remediation
The new release introduces innovative alarm triage and noise reduction improvements. The platform uses ML-driven algorithms to reduce alarm noise, identify root causes, decrease ticket volume, and automate ticket management. Related alarms are clustered into "Situations" to help identify patterns of issues that may impact the health and performance of the business.
"Situations" have been enhanced to cluster on a set of Spectrum root cause and symptom alarms to determine whether an issue is an isolated situation or part of a larger cross-domain problem involving applications, infrastructure, and network. Situation annotations can now be automatically synchronized with ServiceNow tickets, enabling network operators to standardize on DX Operational Intelligence as their primary triage tool without the burden of manually updating the ITSM platform.
Deep dive triage to identify issues faster
Monitored Inventory is the new functionality introduced with this release. It not only provides a single view for cross-domain monitored entities but also connects the workflows through contextual launches to services, alarms, and performance analytics. Users can also manage maintenance windows in the context of a device or service.
Additionally, the improved anomaly detection algorithm not only handles a larger scale of metrics, but also adds the flexibility to configure metrics for anomaly detection through a new intuitive UI.
Service-driven operations enhance collaboration for hybrid teams
DX Operational Intelligence provides a holistic view of key business or IT services, combining health and availability information across all management domains. By assembling a bigger picture, you can view how each element of your service environment is performing, effectively predict capacity utilization, and quickly drill down into specific design or architectural issues. New flexible views now help users quickly assess the impact of issues and navigate to alarms or performance analytics in the context of a service without browsing through the entire topology.
The new version also automates service creation at scale using APIs and lets the user import DX NetOps service topology, providing a higher-level hierarchy view that facilitates visualizing the extended cross-service impact of localized network issues.
Cross-domain dashboards enable observability at scale
The latest release of DX Operational Intelligence unifies visibility across your existing monitoring tools, consolidating data sources across inventory, converting metrics and alarms into visual, cross-domain dashboards. More than ever, every component of the digital chain is correlated to see how everything in the technology stack is connected.
The RESTMon module enables greater performance and availability for data ingestion and consolidation, introducing health dashboards and self-monitoring probes. It also includes new out-of-the-box integrations such as Zabbix, Netcool, Google Cloud, and many others.
A "single pane of glass" lets you move from reactive firefighting to proactive management, minimizing war rooms and finger-pointing associated with tool sprawl. Rather than having disparate teams working with different systems, pulling data into spreadsheets or slides, everyone can go to a single resource. Different users can gain intuitive views around the aspects they care about, ensuring they obtain the right level of insight at the right time.
Now is the time for action
You don’t stay ahead by standing still. In the very near future, end-to-end observability will become a strategic capability necessary to ensure consistent digital operations.
It is not simply about getting IT and business on the same page; it’s about tying technology initiatives directly into the things that matter to the organization as a whole. For that you need to effectively track, understand, and leverage the data that deliver meaningful insights for IT operations and the business. For this reason, AIOps platforms such as DX Operational Intelligence are becoming vitally important. Now is a good time to start reviewing your monitoring approaches.
Visit our AIOps page and the new release presentation at Broadcom’s Enterprise Software Academy to discover how modern AIOps solutions can help your organization gain comprehensive insights and holistic observability.
