IT networks are the foundation of businesses today. Robust networks enable organizations to conduct seamless business operations and deliver services continuously to customers.
To maintain healthy, robust networks, companies depend on ITOps. ITOps refers to the provisioning, monitoring, and management of IT networks to ensure maximum uptime and a better end-user experience.
What is the scope of ITOps?
ITOps is a comprehensive term that includes the tasks of monitoring networks; applying configurations; upgrading hardware, software, and applications; implementing security measures; developing mechanisms to remediate disaster or accident-impacted systems; and providing support to speed up client issue resolution and thus maintain SLAs.
In other words, ITOps helps organizations maintain high-performing networks, which is essential to achieving their business outcomes.
Challenges in ITOps
- Evolving networks: A recent survey by our ManageEngine team on ITOM trends revealed that around 62% of companies are planning to modernize their IT infrastructure, and 83% are prioritizing cloud migration. This clearly shows that networks are constantly adapting to meet customer demands. So, your ITOps strategies must match the rapid pace of network evolution to stay relevant in your business.
- Optimizing storage: Data is an integral component of business today. With each passing day, the data in your network is only going to increase, which may cause a huge strain on your storage systems, gradually affecting network performance. So, it is important to perform capacity planning to forecast future growth and make informed decisions on expanding your storage (as storing data indefinitely is not advisable).
- Rising security concerns: Monitoring your network enables you to identify performance issues and address them quickly. But solely focusing on performance alone is not enough. Your network is impacted by security threats as well, and they can come in various ways, even via a seemingly harmless update to your monitoring software. This calls for IT teams to be more vigilant than ever to avoid a security breach.
Benefits of IT automation
1. Reduces manual effort with better results
With networks constantly evolving and with other issues coming from security threats, network monitoring is becoming a highly challenging, tiring job. Following the conventional approach of increasing your IT team’s resources may not help you address these issues. To handle the mounting challenges, you need to have an agile, intelligent mechanism driven by AI and automation.
By automating routine, mundane tasks and streamlining your day-to-day IT monitoring operations, you not only reduce human error but also accelerate fault resolution. Your IT monitoring teams will also be able to focus their time and effort on thinking strategically and effectively adding more value in terms of the ROI, instead of performing mere repetitive administrative tasks that add little value. Also, automation is essential if you are planning to scale up your organization.
2. Enhances security
Automation can help you secure your environment. For example, it can prevent unauthorized access in a large organization with thousands of employees.
Generally, the IT admins are tasked with the job of assigning user roles and user rights or privileges to everyone in the organization. Sometimes an employee leaves the company but still has access to the organizational files. Sometimes an employee who was a super admin is moved to another team but still possesses their access rights.
When IT admins have to check these employee changes and modify the roles and access rights manually, there may be some mistakes made that raise security issues in the future. But automation avoids these issues. You can define a set of rules or criteria and add or remove users based on it. This reduces human error and protects your network.
Propel ITOps with AI: AIOps capabilities for network monitoring
Our recent survey also pointed out that 45% of companies are planning to implement AIOps-driven strategies in network monitoring. A shift to AIOps-driven monitoring will help your workforce function more strategically and enable the entire organization to take an innovative approach. This will have a very positive impact on your business.
Performing network monitoring operations with the help of AI or AI-driven tools is referred to as AIOps. AIOps in network monitoring primarily helps you monitor the network proactively and reduce fault occurrence at the outset, effectively decreasing downtime.
Root cause analysis
The mean time to repair (MTTR) is a key metric that IT admins strive to keep as low as possible. But to reduce the MTTR value, accelerating root cause identification is crucial. Although you get all the data required from monitoring the network, it can be a painstaking task to find the root cause by analyzing huge amounts of diverse, complex data.
AIOps automates this process. AI quickly reads the data, automatically correlates metrics, makes sense of the data, and suggests the possible root causes. This effectively reduces the time it takes to resolve an issue.
Capacity forecasting and capacity automation
Decision-makers in organizations often face budget challenges when planning to scale up. They need to have a deeper understanding of the computing, networking, storage, and software requirements of their incoming workloads to determine the optimal level of resources.
Without thorough understanding and planning, you may over-provision resources to a deployment that becomes useless. The opposite could be true as well; a lack of proper planning and analysis may result in the under-provisioning of a critical deployment.
Enterprise resources can be optimally provisioned with an AI-driven approach. The historical data of network monitoring forms the basis for capacity forecasting. AI uses this data, identifies patterns, and generates highly accurate forecast values for the critical network resources.
An AIOps platform uses machine learning and predictive analytics algorithms to predict the future capacity requirements of the network, enabling you to make precise, well-informed decisions and avoid a possible resource crunch. An AIOps platform also lets you automate the provisioning of workloads based on their needs, which results in the optimal usage of your critical resources.
Complete your ITOps strategy with a comprehensive monitoring tool: OpManager Plus
To counter the complex, ever-evolving network monitoring demands, you need an AIOps-driven IT monitoring mechanism. Such a system not only monitors the network but also offers insights into future developments, such as through forecasting demands or identifying issues proactively, helping your IT teams greatly.
ManageEngine OpManager Plus is an integrated IT network monitoring solution that enables you to streamline all your ITOps from a single console, eliminating the need to procure separate solutions. With future trends in mind, we are actively developing AI-based features to allow IT teams to become more strategic and productive. Take a look at our recently launched AI-based features.
Here are some other key characteristics of OpManager Plus:
- Real-time monitoring
- Configuration management
- Monitoring support for a wide range of devices
- Application monitoring
- Storage monitoring
- Firewall log management
- IP and switch port monitoring
Interested in OpManager Plus? Try our demo version for free to get a firsthand experience of our product. Or request a quote to learn more about the product and its pricing.
