Gartner Market Guide for AIOps

Data, data everywhere. These days it seems like the world revolves around data and its potential to deliver understanding, efficiency, and often, bottom-line results. IT Operations is no exception.

Over the past decade, we've witnessed an explosion in the volume and speed of data and IT has felt the force of that explosion from all sides: asked to deliver the infrastructure and applications that generate all that data, and also required to become more data-driven in their own operations.

The emerging category of AIOps technologies aims to solve for the latter, using analytics and machine learning to use IT data to get better insight into the performance of the applications and systems on which modern business relies.

In its recently released Market Guide for AIOps, Gartner delves deeper into the emergence of this category, including how AIOps technologies are being used today, recommendations for I&O leaders on implementation, and predictions for the future of the category.

The Market Guide also includes a list of representative vendors, of which ExtraHop is one. While the majority of vendors in the guide focus on IT Operations, we believe that the inclusion of security-centric vendors like ExtraHop acknowledges how many organizations now leverage data sets like network and machine data cross-functionally for both IT Ops and SecOps.

Now, without further ado, let's breeze through the key findings:

"Use of AIOps platforms to augment IT functions such as event correlation and analysis, anomaly detection, root cause analysis and natural language processing is growing rapidly. However, application of AIOps to functions such as ITSM and DevOps is progressing at a slower pace."

AI integration is growing, but certain functions are lagging behind. ITSM and DevOps appear to be behind the pack and both stand to make huge efficiency gains with smarter systems. Almost any operation can benefit from AI—gathering data from diverse sources and parsing it in a way that's beyond the capacity of the human mind. Whether that's noticing subtle trends that may herald an outage or combining data streams to monitor application performance, AIOps have the potential to enable massive gains.

"AIOps platform offerings have split into two approaches: domain-agnostic and domain-centric solutions."

There's a lot of discussion of these two approaches in the report. Should we have broadly applicable programs that can function in a lot of domains? Or should we specialize? The report discusses, in more detail, the differences between these two paths and includes recommendations for when and how to use each approach.

"Enterprises that adopt AIOps platforms use them as a force multiplier for monitoring tools correlating across application performance monitoring (APM), IT infrastructure monitoring (ITIM), network performance monitoring and diagnostics tools, and digital experience monitoring."

AIOps platforms can up the power of your tools. That's true for traditional IT Operations domains, which the report primarily focuses on, and beyond. Here at ExtraHop, we believe that IT and security operations are different missions with one goal. The more they can become one coordinated partnership, the more powerful they'll both become (see our white paper on the subject for more on that). So leveraging AI in both IT and security has the potential to seriously upgrade your enterprise toolset.

Goodbye screwdriver, hello power drill.

"AIOps platform maturity, IT skills and operations maturity are the chief inhibitors to rapid time to value. Other emerging challenges for advanced deployments include data quality and lack of data science skills within I&O."

The success of an AI is dependent on the quality and availability of data. Even the most perfectly designed spaceship won't perform well if you fill it's nacelles with corn chips. As our ability to tap data increases, the capacities of AIOps grow too. It's an exciting world, whether you're looking to buy a platform, mature the one you have, or invest in the market.

Read the full Gartner report for their step-by-step recommendations for adopting AIOps platforms, broad market insights, and vendor specifics.

Gartner, Market Guide for AIOps Platforms, Charley Rich, Pankaj Prasad, Sanjit Ganguli, 7 November 2019

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