Maintaining perspective at the eye of the storm and taking action
Intellyx Whitepaper for New Relic, by Jason English
Like a hurricane, the operational alert fatigue generated by today’s fast-changing complex hybrid IT systems can draw development and IT Ops teams into a confusing maelstrom of events and notifications.
How can a modern software-driven business achieve escape velocity against the pull of this storm, and reach a point of clarity?
This paper will explore how AIOps can help IT teams navigate through the debris of events, combining observability and intelligent filtering to not only reduce application risk and resolve incidents faster, but deliver a meaningful competitive advantage that satisfies both end customers and valued employees.
Challenges: Warning signs of complex applications
Since software defines much of every modern enterprise, warnings issuing forth from business applications are no longer the exclusive problem domain of IT Ops teams. An overabundance of alerts will pull everyone into the fray: development, InfoSec, support, customer service, management, and so on.
What are the contributing factors to such an alert storm?
Hybrid IT complexity. Today’s software is deployed into highly distributed hybrid IT environments, usually made up of a mix of hardware, VMs, and containers, running in data centers, private, or public cloud services. Workhorse enterprise applications can still operate alongside workloads running in containers as microservices or functions. An ideal hybrid architecture keeps what works, and either abstracts away or replaces what isn’t as flexible as needed.
With millions of combinations of conventional services and ephemeral microservices running at any given time behind every touchpoint of the business, even the most well-architected application infrastructure is bound to generate plenty of interoperability and timing conflicts.
Hyperaccelerated delivery. Real continuous delivery was once reserved for a very few ‘born in the cloud’ startup leaders — Netflix, Facebook, Uber, Google, and the like. But now, even once-considered-stodgy companies may be pushing hundreds or thousands of releases a day.
DevOps practices are now entering the mainstream, with more than 20 percent of companies now considered ‘Elite performers’ who on average conduct 208 times more code deployments and recover from issues 2,604 times faster than their low-performing peers …
Read the entire article (PDF, no registration required) on NewRelic.com here: https://newrelic.com/content/dam/new-relic/resources/analyst-report/escaping-alert-vortex-with-aiops-intellyx.pdf
© 2020, Intellyx, LLC. Intellyx retains full editorial control over this document. At the time of writing, New Relic is an Intellyx customer. ServiceNow is a former Intellyx customer. None of the other companies mentioned are Intellyx customers. Image sources: Kentik Mani, Hurricane; Mekanoide, HAL; bluefug (illustrations)
