ITOps in 2024: AI, Open Source, and the Challenges of Overstretched Teams

If you asked most IT professionals to name the most important trends in IT operations and management over the past year, there's a good chance they'd mention AI — and they wouldn't be wrong. AI-related developments have indeed been among the most momentous changes within the IT landscape over the past year.

However, AI is just one strand in the larger narrative of the IT ecosystem's evolution during 2024. For full details, read on as we recap some of the most significant IT management and IT operations stories of the past year.

1. IT Teams Debate Which AI Technology to Select

AI has created plenty of opportunities for streamlining IT work over the past couple of years. But it has also created challenges, including the issue of deciding which AI solutions to adopt.

For example, as we wrote this August, a variety of AI assistants abound. With so many options, the onus is on IT departments to select the best assistant for their companies based on features like customizability and integration with other tools and services.

This trend was notable because it underscores how AI isn't just adding efficiency. It's also increasing the scope of responsibility of IT teams, which are now tasked with procuring and managing AI solutions alongside traditional tools.

Related:Gartner 2024 IT IOCS Highlights: Equipping IT I&O Leaders for an AI Future

2. Meeting AI Storage Needs

In another reminder of how AI has increased the burden IT teams must bear, we wrote this year about selecting the right storage solution for AI workloads. This is important because training and deploying AI tools and services often require working with large volumes of data. To complicate matters further, that data may be subject to special security or compliance requirements, and it may also need to be rapidly accessible to meet AI performance goals.

For all of these reasons, IT teams must be particularly strategic about their storage choices in the age of AI.

3. Wins for Open Source Observability

In a year when funding for software startups has remained tight, Grafana Labs was an exception. The company announced a $270 million funding round. It also said it has around 5,000 paying clients and $250 million in revenue.

This is a big deal because Grafana Labs specializes in observability solutions based on Grafana, an open source visualization and analytics platform. Historically, most of the big players in the observability market (like Splunk, Datadog, and New Relic, to name just a few) have been vendors of proprietary technology. Grafana's news this year suggests that there remain major opportunities for open source observability, too.

Related:ITPro Today’s 2024 State of DevOps Report

4. The Continuing Cool Factor Surrounding eBPF

In a similar vein, the extended Berkeley Packet Filter, or eBPF, also remained a hot technology in 2024, as we explained in an article about eBPF's potential for enhancing Linux security and observability.

Admittedly, hard data about how extensively eBPF is actually being used, or who's using it, remains elusive. Nor does it appear that the typical organization has eschewed more traditional observability technologies, like the OpenTelemetry toolset, in favor of eBPF.

Still, the overall trend seems to be that eBPF continued at least to gain mindshare, and perhaps market share as well, over the past year.

5. New Approaches to Measuring Downtime

In other observability-related developments, we wrote this year about how IT teams can measure "invisible" downtime — meantime performance issues that aren't easily detectable (and may not violate service-level agreements) because servers don't actually crash, even though they underperform.

As we wrote, mitigating invisible downtime requires more sophisticated approaches to application monitoring and observability — ones that can identify deviations from "normal" performance levels even in dynamic environments where there is no consistent measure of "normal." This is another reminder of why IT teams must continue to evolve their observability strategies to meet ever-increasing expectations.

6. The Role of the Network in Uptime

Improving uptime and performance also requires having a highly reliable network — as we explained this year in an article about how to assess the reliability of network providers.

This is important because it can be tempting to treat the network as a sort of commodity and to assume that one network connection is the same as any other. The reality is that some network infrastructures are inherently more resilient than others, and IT operations teams seeking to optimize uptime should be informed about how their network providers' infrastructure works so they can avoid unnecessary reliability risks.

7. The IT Spending Rebound

Improving reliability and other aspects of IT management perhaps became a bit easier in 2024 thanks to the easing of IT budgets. Gartner predicted an uptick in IT spending this past year, and our own IT Priorities Survey found that a majority of organizations reported at least modest increases in their IT budgets.

Spending increases remain small in scope, and they may reflect businesses' interest in flashy new AI ventures as much as investments in nuts-and-bolts IT management solutions. Nonetheless, for IT teams feeling constrained by the budget tightening of the earlier 2020s, the IT spending rebound in 2024 was likely a welcome trend.

8. Overstretched IT Teams

Upticks in IT spending don't necessarily mean IT engineers are no longer overstretched. On the contrary, as we reported back in January, nearly a quarter of IT professionals said they can't complete their work in under 40 hours a week. Measures of job satisfaction were also mixed.

These findings are not exactly surprising given that hiring and retaining skilled IT professionals has been a challenge for some time. But they're still a reminder that even in an age of ever-increasing automation, IT professionals continue to feel overworked and, in some cases, under-appreciated.

9. IT Engineers Moonlight as Security Experts

Part of the reason why IT professionals may feel overwhelmed is that in some cases their jobs aren't purely about IT management. They're also expected to assume responsibility for helping to monitor for and respond to cybersecurity risks.

This might change if organizations invest more extensively in building dedicated cybersecurity teams. But when they don't, responsibility for cybersecurity often falls by default to IT teams, even if they lack specialized security skills.