Broadcom Software Academy Blog

Unify Visibility Across Your Monitoring Tools with DX Operational Intelligence

Written by Pramit Saxena | Jun 22, 2021 6:00:00 AM

For today’s businesses, there’s a premium on delivering innovative user experiences. As a result, stakes continue to grow for the teams in charge of supporting new digital experiences. To successfully implement modern delivery chains, IT operations need to establish comprehensive coverage that delivers unified visibility of the entire enterprise ecosystem. They need observability that spans from mobile applications to networks and mainframes.

Shifting to Domain-Agnostic AIOps Platforms

AIOps platforms such as DX Operational Intelligence are designed to provide end-to-end observability and advanced analytics that delivers the insight for efficiently managing complex environments. However, companies often rely on a disparate set of monitoring tools which can range from packaged solutions to homegrown custom developments – ultimately leading to operational siloes.

As organizations are gaining maturity in AIOps adoption, Gartner envisions the market shifting to domain-agnostic platforms that would help bridge operational silos. This means ingesting increasingly diverse datasets and heavily relying on integrations with many different tools to aggregate monitoring data.

Ingesting Data

DX Operational Intelligence domain-agnostic capabilities are enabled by RESTMon. RESTMon delivers out-of-box integrations with most major monitoring solutions on the market, such as AppDynamics, Nagios, Zabbix, and many others.

It is also extensible to tailor native integrations to match their use cases and develop new integrations. RESTMon makes it possible to leverage existing monitoring investments so that operations teams can act earlier, isolate the root cause faster, and ultimately expedite issue remediation before it affects the business.

Figure 1: DX Operational Intelligence integrates with major monitoring solutions out-of-the-box to provide unified visibility across your application stack from application to infrastructure to user experience.

RESTMon can poll at regular intervals to get information or directly handle 3rd party data streams. It supports various formats such as JSON, XML, CSV for aggregating structured and unstructured data related to topology, inventory, alarms, metrics, and events. The polling interval is configurable and only gets delta data between current and last run, including topology data. Additionally, advanced settings limit the number of outbound calls, control the number of inbound messages, and set the complete topology refresh interval.

As part of data processing, RESTMon also maintains relationship mapping between ingested data. It ensures data context is not lost while ingesting correlated information such as alarm/affected metric, alarm/status, topology/alarm. It also guarantees that users always have the latest view into their monitoring landscape and don’t have to navigate multiple windows to get the latest status.

Once normalized and integrated into DX Operations Intelligence, the ingested data, irrespective of its origin, can be leveraged across all the standard capabilities, service management, alarm noise reduction, anomaly detection, capacity management, dashboards, ticket automation, and remediation.

Unified Visibility

By unifying visibility across your existing monitoring tools, you can move from reactive firefighting to proactive management, minimize wars rooms and finger-pointing associated with tool sprawl. From the application to the underlying infrastructure to the user experience, every component of the digital chain is correlated to see how everything in your technology stack is connected.

Data-agnostic solutions such as DX Operational Intelligence are superior to tools requiring a specific type of data or addressing only a certain range of challenges. The latter solutions can lead to lock-in and restrict your ability to adapt processes to support the never-ending flow of business demands. In contrast, data-agnostic solutions allow teams to work with whichever data sources are available to them and evolve their observability strategy seamlessly along with their IT environment.

As many organizations are challenged by the disparate data generated and stored in isolated monitoring solutions, it is imperative to take a new approach. Rather than constantly having to hunt for the root-cause needle in multiple haystacks, you can opt for data-agnostic AIOps platforms. With end-to-end insights across the entire application stack, from back-end infrastructure to customer behavior and performance, you will be better equipped to ensure the optimal customer experience, every time.

Visit our AIOps page at Broadcom’s Enterprise Software Academy to learn more about how modern AIOps solutions provide end-to-end visibility and observability.