OpsRamp State of AIOps Report Identifies Automation, Data Challenges

Digital operations management vendor OpsRamp released its State of AIOps 2023 report today, revealing insights into the critical features and challenges organizations have withAIOps technologies.

Among the key findings of the report is that AIOps is the path to better automation. More than 60% of respondents noted they are adopting AIOps to improve application availability, performance, and service. Looking deeper into the benefits of AIOps, 58% of organizations are adopting the technology to help automate operations. Coincidentally, IT operations automation was also cited as a top challenge by 66% of organizations.

Other key findings of the report include:

"Probably the biggest surprise was that so many people claimed to be satisfied with the benefits they were getting from AIOps — 98% of enterprises, 96% of MSPs [managed service providers]," Dennis Callaghan, head of content at OpsRamp, told ITPro Today. "We've seen a similar pattern in previous surveys, but not quite like that."

OpsRamp State of AIOps Report Outlines Issues with Automation

Related:4 Ways AIOps Benefits IT Operations

Among the core capabilities of AIOps is the ability to apply automation to manual processes.

While enabling automation is a benefit of AIOps, it can be challenging. Callaghan noted that before automation can occur, organizations need to get the foundational steps done, and that includes having an accurate topology map of applications and infrastructure.

IT operations also need to have monitoring and observability in place to understand the current state of applications, services, and the infrastructure that supports them, he said. In addition, IT operations must be able to correlate events to alerts and help-desk tickets.

Callaghan-OpsRamp

Once the foundational steps are in place, IT operations can automate processes in response to detected events, according to Callaghan.

"That's the promise of AIOps at the end of the day. Get it right and you'll free up your IT teams to accelerate digital transformation initiatives," he said. "The survey results show that IT is mostly at the stage of reducing alert noise and help-desk tickets but not as far along in automation."

Data Quality Remains an AIOps Concern

The OpsRamp State of AIOps 2023 report identified data quality as a top concern for IT operations, which is consistent with past surveys conducted by the company.

Related:AIOps Benefits All Aspects of the Enterprise

Callaghan said that another finding in the report that is consistent with past years is that the greatest incident management challenge is accurately mapping topology between applications and infrastructure.

As to why both data quality and topology mapping remain consistent concerns year after year, it all has to do with the continuing complexity of IT operations overall. Resources that are in multicloud, hybrid cloud, and on-premises environments can be complicated, Callaghan said.

"That complexity offers a lot of benefits in flexibility, agility, and redundancy, but it's hard to manage and it's hard to just map it accurately," he said. "That's a general problem in IT operations."