Top 18 AIOps Use Cases That Make the Case for Smarter Infrastructure

Top 18 AIOps Use Cases That Make the Case for Smarter Infrastructure

As businesses increasingly rely on technology to drive growth, they face mounting pressure to keep their IT systems running smoothly. Even a minor glitch can frustrate customers and employees, hinder productivity, and lead to revenue loss. AIOps use cases help alleviate these pressures by automatically detecting anomalies and resolving IT issues before they disrupt business operations. In this article, we’ll explore the most common Artificial Intelligence Operating System use cases and how they can help you build a more intelligent, more resilient IT infrastructure that scales seamlessly with the demands of modern business.

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What is AIOps and Why is Its Demand Growing?

Person Working - AIOps Use Cases

AIOps, or Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, leverages big data, analytics, and machine learning technologies to enhance IT operations. AIOps utilizes machine learning to automate various IT tasks, with AI playing a crucial role in functions such as anomaly detection and event correlation. 

How AIOps Addresses Complex Data Environments

AIOps analyzes large volumes of machine data to identify patterns, determine the cause of existing problems, and forecast and prevent future issues. Today’s data environments are complex, with data spread across:

  • Microservices
  • Multi-clouds
  • Hybrid clouds
  • Containers
  • Proliferation of distributed systems

Overcoming Data Overload

The result? Massive and unwieldy volumes of log data and performance data can quickly overwhelm IT teams, prevent analysts from performing valuable work, and impede visibility into the network's health and safety. AIOps solutions help IT professionals resolve these issues by effectively monitoring assets and expanding visibility into dependencies, both internally as well as outside of IT systems—and all without human intervention. 

The Evolution of AIOps

In 2016, Gartner coined the term AIOps as a shortened version of "Algorithmic IT Operations." It was intended to be the next iteration of IT Operations Analytics (ITOA). Within a year or so, however, Gartner shifted the phrase to "Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations." This subtle but powerful change in the marketing of the concept highlighted that AIOps was designed to bring the speed and accuracy of AI to IT operations.

Challenges of Modern IT Operations

IT operations management has become increasingly challenging as networks have become larger and more complex. Traditional operations management tools and practices struggle to keep pace with the ever-growing volumes of data generated from multiple sources within complex and diverse network environments.

Data Unification and Fidelity

To combat these challenges, AIOps tools: 

  • Bring together data from multiple sources: Conventional approaches, tools, and solutions weren’t designed in anticipation of the volume, variety, and velocity generated by today’s complex and connected IT environments. Instead, they consolidate and aggregate data, rolling it up into averages, which compromises data fidelity. A fundamental tenet of an AIOps platform is its ability to capture large data sets of any type across the environment while maintaining data fidelity for comprehensive analysis.

  • Simplify data analysis: One of the key differentiators for AIOps platforms is their ability to collect all formats of big data, regardless of varying velocity and volume. The platform then applies advanced data analytics to that data, enabling the prediction and prevention of future issues, as well as the identification of the cause of the existing problems, which facilitates better decision-making.

How AIOps Works: The Nuts and Bolts

Now that we know what AIOps is, let's discuss how it works. Most often, you'll perform AIOps via an AIOps platform. AIOps platforms need to analyze stored data and provide real-time analytics at the point of ingestion.

According to Gartner: "An AIOps platform combines big data and machine learning functionality to support all primary IT operations functions through the scalable ingestion and analysis of the ever-increasing volume, variety, and velocity of data generated by IT. The platform enables the concurrent use of:

  • Multiple data sources
  • Data collection methods
  • Analytical and presentation technologies 

More specifically, they define any AIOps platform by five key characteristics:

  • Cross-domain ingestion of events
  • Topology generation
  • Event correlation
  • Incident identification
  • Remediation augmentation

Let's break down how AIOps works, as defined by Gartner:

  • Ingests data: An AIOps platform gathers data from multiple sources, independent of the vendor or the source.

  • Performs real-time analytics: During data ingestion, AIOps performs real-time data analysis. Thus allowing immediate insight into what is going on. As this detects performance problems or issues immediately, you will be able to respond more quickly in the event of critical incidents.

  • Performs historical analysis: In addition to real-time data analysis during ingestion, AIOps also analyzes previously stored data. Thereby, providing a detailed record of trends or anomalies (if any) that occurred in the past. This allows the IT team to identify recurring problems. They can learn from past issues and thus optimize performance.

  • Leverages machine learning: AIOps utilizes machine learning to continually enhance its ability to analyze, predict, and resolve operational issues. Over time, the system becomes capable of making more intelligent decisions by learning from data patterns, allowing you to forecast potential issues more accurately.

  • Initiates automated actions: As we have learned in the previous points, AIOps analyzes both historical and real-time data to gather valuable insights. Based on that, an AIOps platform can take automated actions. Thereby, reducing the requirement for manual intervention. Teams can therefore focus on planning or other strategic tasks while the system automatically handles routine operations.

Why Businesses Need AIOps

Modern businesses operate using increasingly complex architectures, rapidly growing tech stacks, and numerous applications. Widespread cloud adoption and reliance on scalable IT infrastructures mean businesses face countless potential issues. From reducing alerts to auto-remediating common issues to providing real-time visibility into their tech stack, automating the process of identifying and addressing these problems is now essential. 

Growing Adoption of IT Automation

A recent industry survey revealed that 43% of organizations currently utilize IT automation solutions. Of the businesses that aren't using them, 60% plan to implement one within the next two years. The primary draw for these enterprises is the ability to minimize the manual intervention required to maintain their IT environments running smoothly and efficiently.

From Reactive to Predictive with AIOps

Using advanced tools driven by machine learning technology helps free you from reactive and time-consuming ITSM processes. Instead, AIOps opens the door for predictive analytics and intelligent remediations. This may lead to several positive business outcomes, including:

  • Reduced downtime: Many major business disruptions occur due to unaddressed incremental issues. AIOps brings these potential problems to the surface, allowing for quicker action and enabling ongoing business continuity.

  • Improved efficiency: As businesses scale, so can the number of issues to address. AIOps can provide the much-needed automation and efficiency that busy IT teams need to keep a business operating. By automating manual activities, enabling best practices, and providing continuous system tuning, AIOps helps organizations better prioritize critical tasks.

  • Better customer experiences: AIOps enables organizations to identify potential issues before they cause problems for customers, allowing them to address issues proactively. This ensures faster resolution times and minimizes costly disruptions to critical provided services.

  • Lower costs: AIOps can help businesses reduce operating costs by increasing operational efficiency. By helping to prevent downtime that can disrupt revenue streams and optimizing the use of infrastructure resources, AIOps can actively contribute to a healthier bottom line.

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18 Real-World AIOps Use Cases to Inspire Your Next Tech Upgrade

People Working - AIOps Use Cases

1. Performance Optimization: The Proactive Approach to System Maintenance

System performance issues can occur at any time, day or night. Nevertheless, rather than limiting your business's ability to respond based on core operating hours, AIOps can enhance system and application functionality in real-time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 

Proactive Optimization and Stability

AIOps combines historical data with current usage trends to more accurately predict when systems require optimization. By taking a proactive approach to system maintenance, AIOps helps prevent emergencies and maintains stable operations. Enhanced performance optimization can contribute to: 

  • Less downtime by setting better maintenance schedules
  • Fewer disruptions to critical services
  • Earlier problem identification and resolution 

Protecting Reputation and Revenue with AIOps

System outages can damage customer and partner relationships, breach SLA agreements, and result in lost revenue, irreparably damaging the brand's reputation. AIOps helps you mitigate these risks effectively, ensuring your business continues to meet customers' needs while complying with any regulatory bodies that govern your industry. 

2. Threat and Anomaly Detection: AIOps Makes Security Smarter

Security threats are prevalent in modern business settings. Unfortunately, your IT teams can't be everywhere at once to prevent them. AIOps flips this script, turning manual security practices into more proactive threat-hunting approaches.

In a traditional scenario, businesses might assign a security analyst to monitor specific systems for suspicious activities. Unfortunately, the more time spent sifting through device logs or network traffic patterns, the longer it can take to address and resolve significant issues. 

Real-time Threat Detection and Response

AIOps helps minimize this costly waiting period by identifying unusual logins or potential data breaches as they occur. Through active monitoring, AIOps solutions can:

  • Flag potentially dangerous activity
  • Isolate affected systems
  • Notify security teams for further remediation

For example, Netflix utilizes AIOps to identify anomalies in its streaming service. This improves user experience by minimizing downtime. 

3. Intelligent Alerting: Less Noise, More Insight 

While you may already have various ITSM protocols in place to help support teams track and respond to issues, "alert fatigue" is a common problem in many IT settings. IT staff can quickly become desensitized to potentially critical issues when regularly bombarded with uncategorized support issues or false alarms.

Instead of relying on your IT teams to filter through every system alert, AIOps provides a much more efficient alternative. By intelligently filtering and prioritizing alerts as they occur and "before" they reach IT teams, AIOps can assist in the following areas: 

  • Noise reduction: AIOps helps reduce the likelihood of false positives and irrelevant alerts, ensuring IT teams only focus on the most critical issues.
  • Business impact assessment: Not all IT issues are mission-critical. Nonetheless, rather than leaving these decisions to busy IT teams, AIOps can help determine which operational problems pose the most significant risks to business continuity.
  • Targeted notifications: When responding to system alerts, the more context IT teams have, the quicker they can resolve the problem. AIOps platforms can correlate alerts from various sources to better identify the underlying causes of discovered issues and help IT teams resolve them more efficiently. 

4. Automated Remediation: Fixing Issues Faster with AIOps 

Intelligently alerting IT teams of new issues isn't the only way AIOps improves business efficiency. AIOps solutions can also streamline multiple areas of incident resolution. 

Automated Remediation and Policy Enforcement

AIOps can automate remediation strategies based on business policies or pre-established workflows, rather than relying on human intervention. For example, when monitoring network vulnerabilities, an AIOps solution might discover that critical software systems are missing specific security patches.

Instead of waiting for an IT team to intervene, AIOps can automatically perform real-time security updates to address the issue immediately, actively strengthening system and application security. 

5. Root Cause Analysis: Find the Source of IT Problems Faster 

Addressing critical business issues quickly and efficiently is essential, but knowing "why" these issues occurred is even more crucial.

Root cause analysis is crucial to creating a more resilient business infrastructure. AIOps is a highly valuable asset that can help you gain the necessary perspective to better understand all the events leading up to a significant incident. For example, in a data breach, AIOps can help gather pertinent evidence for further analysis. 

Rapid Breach Analysis and Prevention

Due to the computing power of AI-driven investigative tools, AIOps can leverage system logs, network traffic data, or performance metrics to locate the source of a breach quickly. Once all critical evidence has been collected, AIOps tools can deconstruct the sequence of events that led to the breach and help businesses understand the gaps to prevent it from happening again.

6. Cloud Cost Optimization: Managing Your Cloud Environment with AIOps

Moving to the cloud can keep your business agile and unlock new opportunities for scaling. Nevertheless, this added flexibility can come at a high price if you're not careful. A recent survey revealed that more than a third of businesses could waste between 21% and 50% of their cloud spending. 

AIOps can help your organization better control cloud spending by regularly monitoring usage patterns and automating various cost-saving initiatives. 

Optimizing Cloud Resources with AIOps

AIOps can also execute specific actions, such as shutting down idle instances or right-sizing virtual machines to avoid under- or overprovisioning, helping you continually improve your cloud efficiency and bottom line. By reducing the number of redundant alerts sent to cloud management teams, you're less likely to miss essential usage stats that could impact monthly cloud spending. 

7. Data Analysis: Breaking Down Information Silos 

As your business grows larger, the more data it collects and relies on. Unfortunately, this often leads to a proliferation of disparate data sources. Over time, these information silos make it difficult to source and extract actionable insights, thereby hindering business performance improvement. 

Empowering IT with Actionable Intelligence

AIOps helps overcome this roadblock by enabling IT teams to have the information they need when they need it to keep operations running smoothly, delivering: 

  • Faster access to critical information across your many systems and applications.
  • A unified view for conducting comprehensive big data analysis.
  • Easier extraction of important cross-functional insights taken from a range of data sources. 

Enhanced Business Visibility with AIOps

AIOps can significantly simplify IT teams' ability to visualize critical business data. Whether analyzing system performance metrics, understanding user behavior, or evaluating security logs, AIOps enables IT teams to identify key data points across multiple data sources, thereby improving business efficiency and minimizing risks. 

8. Capacity Forecasting: Using AIOps to Predict Future IT Needs 

Growing your business often comes with unforeseen challenges that can materialize in unexpected demands on your infrastructure. Rather than relying on guesswork or being overly reactive to these changes, AIOps enables you to leverage advanced analytics and predictive forecasting to better plan for capacity adjustments. 

Proactive Capacity Planning

AIOps provides ongoing performance monitoring of your IT environment. It can assess your current and historical business data to identify significant or even subtle spikes in infrastructure demand. Then, it uses this information to provide highly accurate capacity predictions for the coming months or years, allowing you to plan accordingly. 

9. Event Correlation and Analysis: AIOps Helps You See Through the Noise 

Together, event correlation and event analysis offer the ability to see through an “event storm” of multiple, related warnings to the underlying cause of events and decide on how to fix it. The problem with traditional IT tools, though, is that they don’t provide insights into the issue, just a storm of warnings.

AIOps utilizes AI algorithms to group notable events based on their similarity automatically. This reduces the burden on IT teams to manage events continuously and reduces unnecessary (and annoying) event traffic and noise. AIOps then perform rule-based actions, such as: 

  • Consolidating duplicate events
  • Suppressing alerts
  • Closing notable events when they are received 

10. IT Service Management: Improving ITSM with AIOps 

IT service management (ITSM) is a comprehensive term encompassing everything involved in designing, building, delivering, supporting, and managing IT services within an organization. ITSM includes the policies, processes, and procedures for delivering IT services to end-users within an organization. 

AIOps for Enhanced ITSM

AIOps offers benefits to ITSM by leveraging AI to analyze data and identify issues, enabling IT departments to resolve them more quickly and efficiently. For ITSM, AIOps can be applied to data, from monitoring the IT service desk to managing devices. AIOps for ITSM can help IT departments to: 

  • Manage infrastructure performance in a multi-cloud environment.
  • Make more accurate predictions for capacity planning.
  • Maximize storage resources by automatically adjusting capacity.
  • Enhance resource utilization by leveraging historical data and predictive insights.
  • Identify, predict, and prevent IT service issues.
  • Manage connected devices across a network.

11. Automation: Reducing Manual Tasks for IT Teams 

Legacy monitoring tools often require manually cobbling information together from multiple sources before it’s possible to understand, troubleshoot, and resolve incidents. AIOps offers a significant advantage through its ability to automatically collect and correlate data from multiple sources, thereby significantly increasing speed and accuracy.

The AIOps approach automates these functions across an organization’s IT operations, including: 

  • Servers, OS, and networks: Collect all logs, metrics, configurations, messages, and traps to search, correlate, alert, and report across multiple servers.
  • Containers: Collect, search, and correlate container data with other infrastructure data for better service context, monitoring, and reporting.
  • Cloud monitoring: Monitor performance, usage, and availability of cloud infrastructure.
  • Virtualization monitoring: Gain visibility across the virtual stack, make faster event correlations, and search transactions spanning virtual and physical components.
  • Storage monitoring: Understand storage systems in context with corresponding app performance, server response times, and virtualization overhead. 

12. Operationalize FinOps: Using AIOps to Balance Cloud Costs and Performance 

Today, you have seemingly endless options on where your IT systems and applications live—in the cloud, on-prem, and even on the edge. The appeal of this hybrid cloud strategy is that it enables you to have all the necessary resources to ensure optimal application performance. But “always-on” is costly, and too many organizations overprovision to mitigate performance risks (and overspend in the process). 

AIOps for FinOps Enablement

To address this waste, consider implementing FinOps (Finance + DevOps). This cloud financial management practice enables cross-functional teams, such as Engineering, Finance, and Product, to collaborate and take ownership of cloud usage. AIOps helps you operationalize this approach by using data-driven cloud spend decisions to balance cost and performance safely.

Driving Efficiency Through Automation

By using software—not people—you can take appropriate actions and provide applications with the resources they need to perform when needed. You’ll also build trustworthy automation for your IT teams since data backs every action. The result: reduced costs, less alert fatigue, less waste, and documented ROI for your automation efforts. 

13. Create More Sustainable IT: The Environmental Impact of AIOps 

According to a study from the IBM Institute for Business Value, CEOs ranked sustainability as the top challenge, ahead of regulations, cyber risks, and technology infrastructure. There are many ways to approach this challenge. Still, the most successful CEOs are leveraging their sustainability investments to optimize operations and embrace digital transformation—a win-win scenario that combines sustainability performance with improved financial outcomes. 

AIOps for Sustainable Data Centers

To meet your sustainability challenges, start by optimizing your data center. Data centers worldwide account for 1-1.5% of global electricity use. You can make an immediate impact by making data-driven decisions on application resource allocation. When applications consume only what they need to perform, you can:

  • Increase utilization
  • Reduce energy costs and carbon emissions
  • Achieve continuously efficient operations 

14. Improve CI/CD Pipelines: AIOps Tools for DevOps 

The continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is an agile DevOps workflow that focuses on delivering software frequently and reliably. It enables DevOps teams to write code, integrate it, run tests, deliver releases, and deploy changes to the software collaboratively and in real-time. A key characteristic of the CI/CD pipeline is the use of automation to ensure code quality. 

AIOps for CI/CD Observability

As you consider ways to improve your IT systems, employing observability to create a high-performing CI/CD pipeline is an excellent use case for AIOps. Observability, powered by AI and automation, replaces older, more manually intensive performance monitoring tools. You gain full-stack visibility to better understand your environment and speed up innovation. 

Comprehensive Production Monitoring

You’ll also have automatic discovery, monitoring, and validation of the performance and integrity of applications in production, including your:

  • Cloud infrastructure
  • Virtual machines
  • Container-based microservices
  • Shared multi-tenant infrastructures
  • Storage systems

All reporting on metrics such as usage, availability, and response times. 

15. Strengthen End-to-End System Resilience: AIOps for IT Stability 

Organizations continually seek to enhance the resilience of their end-to-end IT systems to mitigate risks associated with system failures, outages, and downtime. By applying this AIOps use case, you can strengthen end-to-end IT resilience and ensure uninterrupted service availability.

Accelerating Incident Resolution with AIOps

By leveraging real-time root cause analysis capabilities powered by AI and intelligent automation, AIOps enables ITOps teams to swiftly identify the underlying causes of incidents and take immediate action to reduce both mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolve (MTTR) incidents.

AIOps platform solutions consolidate data from multiple sources and correlate events into incidents, granting clear visibility into the entire IT environment through dynamic infrastructure visualizations, integrated AI capabilities, and suggested remediation actions.

Using predictive IT management, your IT teams can leverage AI and machine learning algorithms to automate IT and network operations, resolving incidents swiftly and efficiently, proactively preventing issues before they occur.

  • Enhancing user experiences
  • Cutting costs
  • Driving business success 

16. Eliminate Tool Sprawl: Streamlining IT Operations with AIOps 

We’ve all been there—just when you’ve mastered one business tool, another comes along. 53% of organizations say their IT teams need to spend even more time managing technologies and infrastructure. This IT tool sprawl—characterized by the proliferation of multiple tools and applications across the IT environment—leads to increased:

  • Complexity
  • Inefficiency
  • Higher management efforts 

AIOps: Unifying IT for Agile Incident Management

For a more agile and streamlined incident management process and a better employee experience, the use case for AIOps tools is compelling. An AIOps platform provides a holistic view of your IT operations, enabling you to consolidate various IT tools into a centralized solution—a central pane of glass for monitoring and management.

Leveraging AI and automation, an AIOps platform aggregates, correlates, and analyzes vast amounts of data from various sources. It can also trigger notifications, alerts, and remediation actions, eliminating the need for cross-disciplinary emergency meetings.

17. Continuous Improvement: AIOps Learns from the Past 

Past experiences, current usage, and user feedback provide valuable data to help prevent issues similar to those in the past, which is crucial for continuous improvement. AIOps leverages this knowledge to continually become smarter and deliver tailored correlations, insights, and recommendations. 

18. Industry-Specific AIOps Use Cases: AIOps for Business Continuity 

AIOPs have gained traction in various industries due to their ability to streamline and improve operational processes. Let's take a look at some examples of how AIOps is being applied in different sectors: 

  • Banking and finance: AIOps is used for fraud detection and prevention. By analyzing large amounts of data in real-time, AIOps can identify and flag suspicious transactions, providing a more accurate and efficient way to combat fraudulent activities.
  • Retail: AIOps is transforming the retail industry by optimizing supply chain management. By utilizing machine learning algorithms, retailers can accurately predict demand and inventory levels, thereby reducing waste and ensuring products are readily available to customers. AIOps can also be leveraged for personalized marketing strategies by analyzing customer data and behavior.
  • Healthcare: AIOps is being utilized to enhance patient care and reduce costs. By analyzing patient data, doctors can make more accurate diagnoses and provide personalized treatment plans. AIOps can also aid in hospital operations by predicting equipment maintenance needs and optimizing staff schedules.
  • Manufacturing: AIOps is being utilized for quality control and predictive maintenance in the manufacturing sector. By analyzing data from machine sensors, AIOps can identify anomalies or potential breakdowns before they occur, thereby preventing costly downtime. Additionally, it can aid in inventory management by forecasting demand and optimizing production levels.
  • Transportation: AIOps enables predictive maintenance for vehicles and optimizes routes for maximum efficiency. By analyzing data from vehicle sensors, AIOps can identify potential issues before they escalate into significant problems, thereby reducing maintenance costs and enhancing safety. It can also optimize route planning by taking into account real-time traffic and weather conditions. 

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