Comparing AIOps Tools: A Report and Buyers Guide

By now, you’ve likely heard of AIOps. By leveraging AI and Machine Learning to automate or streamline IT operations, AIOps promises to unlock new levels of efficiency for IT teams. In turn, AIOps stands to play a pivotal role in helping IT organizations manage environments that are growing ever larger and more complex.

But which AIOps tools actually exist that can do these things? Which use cases do they support, and which AIOps platforms are best based on a team’s priorities? These are the real questions that IT organizations increasingly need to answer as they consider AIOps adoption.

Given the size and complexity of the AIOps tool market, these are not simple questions. At least a dozen vendors now market tools or platforms as AIOps solutions. There is considerable diversity between them in terms of what their tools actually do, which AIOps use cases they do or don’t support, which types of data the tools require and so on.

To help IT pros navigate the complex AIOps tool space, researchers at Omdia recently prepared a report, “Omdia Universe: Selecting an AIOps Solution, 2021-22,” that compares AIOps platforms. For the full details, you’ll want to check out the report and the free AIOps buyers guide we prepared based on it (see below).

But if you’re seeking a shorter version of the key takeaways from Omdia’s AIOps market research, keep reading. Below, we unpack the state of the AIOps tool market, highlight the strengths and weaknesses of competing AIOps solutions and consider where IT organizations should look if they are planning an AIOps implementation today – or expanding on investments they may already have made in AIOps.

Takeaway 1: The AIOps market is large and diverse

Perhaps the single most important takeaway from the report is that there is a large and diverse market of AIOps tools out there.

That may seem too obvious even to note. But given that AIOps remains a relatively new domain -- Gartner coined the term only in 2016 -- it’s remarkable that the market has expanded significantly in a short period of time.

The bulk of that growth has been driven by established tool vendors -- most of whom traditionally focused on Application Performance Monitoring or IT operations management -- who have expanded into AIOps. That’s why you’ll see names like BMC and Splunk in our buyers guide. None of these vendors did AIOps per se five years ago, but they are now vying to claim their slice of the AIOps market.

But the AIOps tools market is not dominated solely by large, established vendors. You’ll also see some younger, smaller companies (albeit no brand-new startups) in our guide, such as PagerDuty and Sumo Logic. (There’s also IBM, whose AIOps foray has been driven mostly by its acquisition of Instana, an APM startup.)

Takeaway 2: Performance monitoring remains the main AIOps use case

The Omdia report and AIOps buyers guide make clear that performance monitoring remains the use case that AIOPs vendors are targeting first and foremost. With few exceptions, most of AIOPs platforms Omdia analyzed scored highly in the performance monitoring category.

Results are more mixed for other AIOps use cases, such as security and compliance or alerting. Although a few vendors excel in these areas, the majority continue to register their greatest strengths when it comes to leveraging AIOps to improve performance monitoring of applications or infrastructure.

Takeaway 3: AIOps tools are environment-agnostic

For the most part, the leading AIOps tools are capable of supporting any type of environment. Whether you want to use AIOps in the cloud or on-prem, or with Linux- or Windows- centric environments, most AIOps tools will work for you.

As the Omdia report details, there are some differences between tools in terms of how easy they are to deploy in various types of environments and which specific types of data they can collect. But for the most part, AIOps tool buyers don’t have to worry about which environments they run when selecting tools.

Takeaway 4: Integrations are key

Most of the AIOps tools available today don’t try to be standalone solutions that pack all facets of AIOps functionality -- data management, alert management, collaboration tooling and operations automation -- into a single platform.

Instead, they rely heavily on integrations with third-party solutions to build out complete functionality. That’s especially the case for areas like collaboration, and, to a lesser extent, alert management.

What this means for AIOps buyers is that, in most cases, additional tools will be required -- and integrations will need to be configured -- to take full advantage of AIOps. Buyers may want to consider which collaboration and alarm management software their teams already use, then make sure the AIOps tools they are considering will integrate with those solutions.

Takeaway 5: AIOps for security remains basic

A final takeaway from the report and buyers guide is that, although AIOps tools can be applied to streamline security operations, most AIOps vendors have invested few resources in supporting that AIOps use case.

While almost all AIOps tools that Omdia evaluated can be applied to security use cases, most are not designed with these use cases in mind. They focus more on performance monitoring, as noted above. As a result, buyers should expect to do some manual configuration if they want to use AIOps tools for security -- or they should perhaps consider security operations tools that include AIOps features, a category of tool that Omdia did not analyze for this report.

Conclusion

To sum up: The AIOps tool market is large and diverse, but it continues to lean primarily toward performance monitoring use cases. Vendors also rely heavily on integrations between tools, but their tools work mostly in any type of environment.

That, at least, is the short version of the state of the AIOps tool market based on Omdia’s findings. Again, for the full story, check out the Omdia report and our complete AIOps buyers guide. Fill out the below form to access the free buyers guide.