Broadcom today extended the reach of its artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) platform to provide full-stack observability via integrations with 15 third-party data sources including Dynatrace, Datadog, AppDynamics, PagerDuty, Splunk, ServiceNow, SolarWinds and Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager.
In addition, Version 2.0 of AIOps from Broadcom now captures data at the chip level to enable IT teams to triage network congestion and packet loss in real-time.
The latest release also adds visualizations and dashboards for different IT personas along with a recommendation engine that enables IT teams to automate tasks once the root cause of an issue is surfaced by the platform.
Sreenivasan Rajagopal, director of products and strategy for Broadcom Enterprise Software, said the new approach allows IT teams to decide what level of automation to apply based on the complexity of the problem and potential risk to the business.
Collectively, these capabilities are intended to make it easier to align people and processes with business outcomes by creating a continuous feedback loop, he said, noting it takes about 90 days for the machine learning algorithm embedded within AIOps from Broadcom to start delivering on that promise.
Other capabilities included as part of the latest release are additional machine learning topology and correlation capabilities, causal graphs and intelligent situational analysis for automatic root cause analysis, noise mitigation, alarm clustering and anomaly detection. Broadcom has also added a library of machine learning algorithms, natural language processing and an ontological graphical topology to enable situational correlation.
Finally, Broadcom has added capacity analytics tools that can be applied to specific groups of services that IT teams are collectively managing and maintaining.
Rajagopal said it’s now only a matter of time before AI is applied more broadly to enable IT teams to become more agile. AIOps won’t replace IT staff as much as it will simply augment the capabilities of the IT staff, he noted.
AIOps also will prove vital as older members of the IT team retire, Rajagopal added. Newer members of the IT staff will be able to become productive much faster if they can rely on insights and recommendations surfaced by an AIOps platform.
It’s not clear to what degree AIOps platforms will exist as a separate entity apart from traditional IT services management (ITSM) platforms that are also being infused with machine learning platforms. Broadcom is making a case for a distinct new IT operations platform that relies on data to align people, processes and platforms. The single biggest obstacle in terms of achieving IT agility is not the tools as much as it is people in different roles who can’t empathize with one another because there is no common source of data that every stakeholder can access, said Rajagopal.
Regardless of the AIOps path chosen, it’s clear that many of the existing tools IT teams rely on to manage IT environments are slowly becoming obsolete. In fact, there may come a time soon when IT teams won’t even consider an IT management platform that doesn’t have some level of AI capability.
