The technology helps businesses manage large volumes of

data across IT systems, and reduces the time it takes to

perform operational tasks and respond to everyday issues.

The AIOps
mission: Simplify
Produced in association with

the complex
2  MIT Technology Review Insights

F
or Sergio Puga, an undetected problem in
information technology (IT) can have disastrous
consequences. Puga is a senior technical Key takeaways
program manager at FedEx Services, which
provides IT for the global shipping company.
Issues like not enough computing power getting to As data volumes rise and IT environments
applications could trigger hours of expensive downtime, become increasingly complex, teams
lost productivity, and troubleshooting. This means delivery are struggling to monitor and manage
personnel don’t get the right information, packages don’t the performance and reliability
get delivered, and customers get angry. of applications and systems.

 IOps, which uses artificial intelligence

A
“FedEx can’t fail; reliability is paramount. We can’t have
and analytics to extract predictive
any service interruptions,” Puga says.
insights from company data, can
identify problems before they start,
As companies like FedEx rapidly transition to digitization,
helping IT avert expensive outages.
they are grappling with the daunting challenge of managing
and processing massive volumes of data that live in siloed, Because AIOps is designed to
disparate systems. IT teams that manually oversee and uncover insights more efficiently than
monitor these complex data sets are drowning in a sea of legacy tools, it can ultimately lower
often inexplicable data and, as a result, end up expending a total cost of ownership, accelerate
great deal of time and money troubleshooting issues and return on investment, and help
completing routine operational tasks. organizations stay competitive.

One solution to the problem may be AIOps technology,

which combines artificial intelligence (AI) and machine
learning (ML) to automate data correlation, enable root-
cause analysis, and deliver predictive insights across the connections across data silos, business users can reap
corporate ecosystem. AIOps increases IT departments’ the benefits, making informed, intelligent decisions based
operational efficiency by accessing companywide on real-time data.
data, extracting insights about IT systems, monitoring
operational and usage statistics, and proactively solving FedEx, for example, is in the early stages of AIOps
application performance problems. That way, IT can deployment. Using the technology to monitor applications
avoid crippling outages that negatively affect customers allows Puga’s IT team to troubleshoot, solve, and avert
and damage the bottom line. And since AIOps makes potential problems “in seconds.”

“FedEx can’t fail; reliability is paramount.

We can’t have any service interruptions.”
Sergio Puga, Senior Technical Program Manager, FedEx Services
 MIT Technology Review Insights 3

“If our team investigated the same CPU utilization problem

using current monitoring tools, it would take six to 10
full-time employees two to five hours to find the source
and perform remediation,” Puga says.
How much data
AI greases IT wheels
Application performance monitoring tools automate is generated
many bread-and-butter IT tasks to ensure applications
are up and running, and companies are scrambling to
every minute?
Every email sent, link clicked on, and smartphone
scoop them up. The global IT operations and service
swiped adds to a vast and ever-expanding universe
management tools market helps IT operations teams
of information.
monitor, detect, and mitigate irregular and anomalous

2,472
behavior on IT infrastructure and services. By 2025, the
market’s revenues will reach $35.98 billion and have a
compound annual growth rate of 7.5%, according to a
forecast from Research and Markets.1 megawatt-hours of electricity are used for the internet

2,833
But today’s tools largely react to problems that arise.
That won’t cut it in increasingly complex IT environments
spread across virtualized and multi-cloud systems.
“Digital networks are chaotic; they have a scale and Smartphones are sold

4,756
complexity that are too large to be managed manually,”
says Matt Chotin, senior director of technology strategy
at AppDynamics, a vendor of application performance
management software. “You can’t just throw more
Internet-of-things connections are made
bodies at them.”

AIOps, a term originally coined by market research

company Gartner, weds AI and ML functionality to IT
operations to overcome the limitations of traditional
176,220
calls are made on Skype
monitoring tools. AIOps platforms use self-learning ML
algorithms not only to automate routine tasks, but also The internet receives

3,138,420
to understand the behavior of the systems they monitor,
using insights pulled from company data. And the
technology goes beyond machine-generated metrics,
making use of things such as business statistics and gigabytes of traffic
user-behavior metrics, to enhance analysis and assist IT

12,986,111
staff in prioritizing where they spend time.

For example, AIOps can alert the IT team when a server

Texts are sent
is reaching its capacity limits, enabling administrators to

159,362,760
either allocate more capacity or move users to other
servers to avert server slowdowns or crashes. Similarly,
AIOps can remind IT departments when they need to
apply security patches or updates or when systems need Emails are sent
to be taken offline for routine maintenance. Collectively, Source: Domo’s “Data Never Sleeps 6.0”
these capabilities vastly improve IT’s ability to automate
routine maintenance tasks and avoid problems.
4  MIT Technology Review Insights

“Digital networks are chaotic; they have a scale

and complexity that are too large to be managed
manually. You can’t just throw more bodies at them.”
Matt Chotin, Senior Director of Technology Strategy, AppDynamics

‘Mission control’
Given the capabilities of AIOps tools, it’s not surprising
that IT executives are increasingly seeking them as a
means to help organizations retrieve, analyze, and extract
value from IT operations data.

“[AIOps] finesses and refines the data much more quickly

and presents me with alternative paths and options,” says
Steve Sommer, CIO at Stromberg & Forbes, a real estate
investment company in Marcos Island, Florida. Sommer
has tested AIOps packages and platforms from several
vendors over the past two years. Although Stromberg AIOps capabilities
& Forbes is still at the early stages of its AIOps rollout,
Sommer says it will have a heterogeneous deployment At its core, AIOps promises to deliver more
that relies on vendors that can “deliver advanced efficient, focused, and reliable data processing.
functionality and top-notch technical support.” The marriage of artificial intelligence, machine
learning, and analytics enables organizations
AIOps’ use of AI and ML algorithms empowers IT and their teams to sort through and process
departments. They can now perform such tasks as mounds of data and identify and correlate
capacity prediction for data centers, measuring the key data points and meaningful relationships.
effectiveness of the organization’s main business
AIOps can perform key tasks, such as:
applications, and performing cause-and-effect analysis
of peak usage traffic patterns. AIOps automates these • Cause-and-effect analysis
tasks, quickly ferreting out the connections among all • Highlighting usage patterns
of the large volumes of siloed data and delivering • Troubleshooting
information that is broad, deep, and insightful. • Prioritizing issues based on sensitivity
and severity
For example, at a retail company, AIOps can draw on past
• Providing alerts with respect to potential
sales activity to predict when website sales might spike
failures
and potentially paralyze application performance. The
• Correlating alerts across all tools
technology allows IT departments to shift, add, and
deploy extra computational resources as needed to • Proactively notifying IT when a specific
accommodate upsurges in network traffic; the systems machine, device, or application needs
keep humming, with no performance blips. It also cuts an upgrade
down on the number of manpower hours and amount • Correlating data volumes in real time
of resources needed to accomplish daily activities. • Providing IT with actionable insights
• Constructing predefined responses
“AIOps is mission control and command central,” says
to mitigate risk
Sommer. Without the technology, “I as a human could
spend days and weeks trying to navigate through large,
complex data sets trying to find solutions to issues.”
 MIT Technology Review Insights 5

IT benefits, business benefits

AIOps delivers tangible benefits to IT departments and,
in turn, business users, according to Chotin. First and
foremost, the technology ensures end-user applications
are performing as expected. “Customers don’t care how
the application is made; they’re primarily concerned that
applications work properly. They want to know that their
banking or sales transaction successfully completed,”
Chotin says. “AIOps has the ability to tell the IT department “I as a human could spend
what end users are experiencing and to assure them they
are meeting performance expectations.”
days and weeks trying to
navigate through large,
And because it can access data regardless of department
or business unit, AIOps can help uncover insights more
complex data sets trying
efficiently, and ultimately lower total cost of ownership to find solutions to issues.”
and accelerate return on investment. It can also help
organizations like FedEx remain efficient and competitive, Steve Sommer, CIO, Stromberg & Forbes

Roots of IT complexity
Managing today’s IT and application environments is not easy. In a recent survey, respondents reported that
an assortment of “important” factors contribute to the difficulty.

84% 81% 81% 80% 77%

74% 72% 71%

r , g
fo ing es m’
s m sin ing er
s s at s u m s te t f ro e s ain de us s
rm pe eg et ol pe ys rin s rs oc t nt
ce
fo
lat ta t
y gr ta s h v a ty e s otp tem ndo pr ain co e
ist erfa
p g i g rg o s e h M om s
e t da A da h at La ata
f y v tc st on int
ipl ge ing nt d g s iple Ba cu Inc
ult eren a r g
a er e d t i n l t
M iff gl an gr
a mu
d a tin M f diff nte
c o I
pli
re

Source: CIO Insight Reports, February 2015 Managing Complexity Survey of 339 IT executives at midsize and large organizations worldwide
6  MIT Technology Review Insights

and drive innovation. Applying AIOps can provide At Stromberg & Forbes, Sommer estimates AIOps can
intelligent automation across the company’s entire shave off one-third to one-half of the management and
ecosystem, Puga says. manpower hours the company expends performing
routine manual maintenance and troubleshooting.
This is a particularly useful benefit since FedEx has With IT processes thus streamlined and improved—
made nine acquisitions since 2012 and now employs and downtime avoided—business users stay connected
425,000 workers worldwide. AIOps will make it easier to to the applications they need to provide advice and
track data worldwide for both management and security support in investment strategy to real estate clients,
purposes. Right now, “administrators don’t have back- Sommer says.
ground information, so we don’t know if we’re facing a
small issue or a potential catastrophe. It takes time to AIOps also fosters improved collaboration and
figure out patterns,” Puga says. cooperation among various departments and teams,
improving outcomes for the business and its customers.
Puga sums up the totality of its benefits this way: “It’s
going to drive innovation, streamline FedEx’s operations,
and make us more reliable, efficient, and competitive—
and make my job a lot easier.”
 MIT Technology Review Insights 7

The AIOps mission: Simplify the complex is an executive briefing paper by MIT Technology Review Insights. It is based on
research and interviews conducted in April and May 2019. We would like to thank all participants as well as the sponsor,
AppDynamics. MIT Technology Review Insights has collected and reported on all findings contained in this paper
independently, regardless of participation or sponsorship.

About MIT Technology Review Insights

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From the sponsor

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Together with Cisco, we’re helping companies make mission-critical and strategic decisions that improve
customer experience and accelerate business in a multi-cloud world. Learn more at www.appdynamics.com.

Footnotes

1. Research and Markets, “Global IT Operations and Service Management Market Analysis & Trends - Industry Forecast to 2025,” August 2017.

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