Prevent avoidable outages using AIOps and observability

An outage due to a predictable event is every CIO’s nightmare. All it takes is a networking misconfiguration that causes cascading failures over time to bring on trouble.

Certainly, while these kinds of events are, strictly speaking, “predictable” that doesn’t mean they are easy to foresee. Predicting infrastructure needs to support future usage, for example, is complex task. IT must understand the future requirements of a service, how usage will change over time, and how to compensate for future spikes.

These kinds of “predictable” outages are, in fact, far too complex to be accurately predicted using manual tools. First, these tools can produce more noise than they do signal, and each only shows what’s happening in their specific domain. Determining which alerts are real is a cumbersome and time-intensive task. Additionally, the relationships between future outages and data such as events, changes, logs, traces, and tickets are extremely complex. There’s just too much information and too many variables for a human being to comprehend them. Besides, IT professionals spend so much time fighting fires and resolving events, they don’t have time to crunch the data and provide the predictability needed to proactively address issues before they cause harm.

Enter the predictive power of AIOps and observability

AIOps, combined with observability, can provide IT with the necessary power to predict and prevent events before they occur, which improves service reliability, reduces the number of outages, and frees up IT practitioners to spend more time on innovation. By connecting to and analyzing past data from a wide array of sources, AI can uncover the subtle patterns that accurately foretell an impending outage.

The BMC Helix platform enables AIOps by learning the future requirements of a service and how usage fluctuates over time. With this information, BMC Helix then creates a model to alert IT of potential capacity issues well before something bad happens.

Here’s an example of how this works. BMC experts working with a customer were using the BMC Helix platform to enable AIOps, and the configuration item (CI) topology and analysis alerted them of a potential issue. In the associated incident, a third-party tool had increased logging, and, as a result, it was overtaxing the file system. BMC Helix Intelligent Automation, which ran when the alert fired, enabled IT to easily delete excessive logs it ever affected the customer. Even better, as the system continuously monitored the environment, it learned that event to become even smarter, searching for similar events to automatically remediate similar situations.

BMC Helix can also run what-if scenarios to minimize risk and ensure services are optimized for the loads they will be expected to bear. This means organizations can more easily balance cost and risk and find the right balance to accommodate natural growth. This approach also provides enough cushion for spikes due to both expected (ie., big product launch) and unexpected one-off events, such as a natural disaster.

With BMC Helix, IT gains the ability to identify and resolve issues before they grow into incidents that affect the business.

Learn more about the BMC Observability and AIOPs solution can help prevent outages within your IT organization.