In IT operations (ITOps), as in business, as in life: Simplicity is beautiful. Simplicity is the key to a well-oiled enterprise, and as the speed of digital transformation accelerates and the cost to outpace market competition rises, enterprises must look to achieve simplicity with automation.
Automating ITOps is critical as businesses continue to digitally transform. Automating processes not only improves cost and operational efficiencies, but also drives and ensures a smooth experience for customers. Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to predict behavior so that ITOps can automate and perform at the speed that customers expect.
There are several steps enterprise IT leaders should consider taking along their AIOps journey. Here are four of them:
Take your data to the next level.
First, ITOps teams can evaluate their pain points by looking at their data. Many companies are operating on legacy tools that don’t provide end-to-end visibility into digital services, nor do they support the shift to multi- and hybrid-cloud environments. In fact, 33% of companies use 20 or more monitoring tools, further adding to IT complexity and reducing business agility. Too many tools and fragmented data can lead to service disruptions, issues with finding faults in a system and a poor customer experience outcome.
A large utility provider typically has 30 to 90 people in a “war room” at a time, all working to pinpoint the root cause of an incident. Without a consolidated view of their topology and data, ITOps teams spend hours in the war room piecing together siloed information. A dashboard that provides visibility and context across the entire IT environment can bring efficiencies to IT operations.
IT teams can get to the heart of the problem by turning their data “swamp” into a pristine data “lake.” Effective training data, enriched by AI/ML-driven analytics, enables ITOps to make correlations, extract real-time insights and flesh out issues before they impact business performance.
Find the right solution provider for your needs.
Enterprises have begun to appreciate the impact of ITOps on the bottom line and are applying more budget and resources to sustain ongoing service availability. However, it’s difficult to automate end-to-end ITOps processes with a multi-vendor approach to managing disparate applications and infrastructures. As enterprises continue to grow and innovate, the need to handle digital transformation initiatives at scale — yet support legacy environments — is all the more important.
A holistic, cross-domain ITOps platform that can span complex environments can bring improved efficiencies and puts an enterprise on the path to AIOps. But you can’t find this with legacy monitoring tools, which have little to no cloud coverage, making it nearly impossible to see what’s occurring in a multi-cloud and/or hybrid environment. Look for an AIOps automation engine that enables ITOps to focus on strategic initiatives.
In a rapidly evolving digital ecosystem, a few simple actions can put your business on the road to AIOps. You should first identify and gather relevant IT operations data. Once structured and unstructured data has been collected, the next step is to analyze and review past IT failures to determine their root causes. You can then use this insight to prepare your systems for the monitoring and automated response components of AIOps.
Evaluate your KPIs to measure success.
So how do you know if your AIOps strategy is working? An ITOps solution should help grow the business through the improvement of key performance indicators (KPIs). These could be as mundane as handling an incident, from boosting initial response time to creating a problem ticket. They could also be more advanced, looking at mean time to incident resolution or at how many problems occur annually where the underlying root cause goes unknown. The outcome of these KPIs should be included in your AIOps strategy.
Insights from AI/ML-driven analytics produce real-time business performance metrics, which can allow teams to resolve incidents faster or avoid incidents altogether. It can also allow IT teams to be more productive, freeing them up to advance IT innovations rather than just maintaining the status quo.
A modern, automated solution can enable the C-suite to understand how mission-critical processes ultimately impact the bottom line. Enhanced internal operations, combined with future-proofed technology, mean an enterprise can deliver a more positive end-user digital experience and increase customer retention. In this sense, ITOps can become a core business driver, rather than a backend process.
Invest in your digital future.
Finding and fixing problems with speed and accuracy is an important aspect of running an enterprise, and companies that depend exclusively on legacy tools may put themselves at risk of falling behind.
IT leaders that invest in a modern AIOps-enabled solution stand to gain real-time business performance insights that support greater agility and bring order to chaos. In a world where customer experience is everything, your digital environment is the best representation of your enterprise.
Google Flights aims to save flyers money with new alerts on nearby airports, travel dates
This is how you use google flights to save money on your next trip. Buzz60’s Natasha Abellard has the story. Buzz60
Google Flights is trying to make the process of booking a flight a little easier — and less stressful — with some new updates.
Google rolled out a new feature in November for all users that notifies them when cheaper flights are available at nearby airports, Craig Ewer, a spokesperson for Google, confirmed to USA TODAY. Google also now offers a similar feature that notifies you if altering your travel dates could mean saving a significant chunk of change.
"We want people to trust that Google Flights helps you find the best flights that best fit your needs," Thijs van As, product lead for the Google Flights team, told USA TODAY. For example, if you're flying from New York to Washington and there is a flight available that's half the price or cheaper than what you're looking it, the site will inform you about changes to your itinerary.
Travelers don't buy tickets from Google (though they can book on the platform). The portal partners with airlines and travel agents to collect flight information. Effectively, it's a one-stop shop with insights and purchasing convenience.
A host of other providers, such as Kayak and Scott's Cheap Flights, provide similar listings. Expedia, Kayak, Travelocity and others let you set up price alerts via email to stay on top of your flights (as does Google Flights). Some of these services include options of adding nearby airports or including flexible dates when booking.
Google has been examining what the biggest problems travelers face when booking flights. The biggest? "People don't know what is a good price for a flight," nor do they know the right time to book, van As added.