Thanks to rising costs, skills shortages and ever-growing security threats, businesses must adapt quickly to shifts in demand patterns brought on by a digital workforce and rapidly changing buyer behavior. That requires putting extra emphasis on the resiliency and performance of your business processes and supporting applications.

For larger IT organizations with increasingly hybrid and complex application landscapes that often include IBM Z®, it’s essential to take a comprehensive approach to IT operations. The challenge becomes “How do you effectively sift through terabytes of data in real time to identify an issue before it becomes an outage?” That’s why organizations are drawn to the promise of AIOps to use AI-driven intelligence and automation to make quick and accurate decisions to maintain resiliency.

A holistic approach to AIOps

You cannot successfully adopt AIOps in pieces or silos. It requires a holistic approach focused on business processes and workflows. The resiliency of a workflow depends on the health of every link in the chain. To succeed, you need visibility and insight into the entirety of the workflow. Once you understand that you must apply AIOps holistically to reach its full potential, it’s clear why leaving the mainframe out of the equation creates a significant gap. The mainframe must be central to an AIOps solution and is the essential element of most business-critical workflows

Achieving a holistic approach to AIOps requires intelligent tools and processes that provide hybrid cloud visibility, use AI and machine learning in a simple, explainable way and automate timely actions to avoid customer impact.

Integrated solutions that are user friendly and that provide real-time visibility can expedite root cause analysis and collaboration, and provide a common truth for your organization. In this video we see how an integrated IBM Z AIOps solution provides a user friendly, integrated, interface to help accelerate time to value.

Accelerate your journey to AIOps

Over the years, IBM has worked with hundreds of organizations to help them mature how they run their data centers. To make the lessons learned from these client interactions more consumable, IBM has produced a framework that can be used as an aid to accelerate your journey to AIOps.

To help you accelerate through these stages of AIOps on IBM Z framework, you need to integrate a broad set of strategies:

• Detect: Identify potential issues as soon as possible, ideally before they disrupt your business. To accomplish this, you need to focus on three areas: full-stack monitoring of your infrastructure, end-to-end hybrid cloud observability of your applications and AI anomaly detection.
• Decide: Isolate the problem rapidly, doing deep-domain metrics and root cause analysis to decide on the next actions. Numerous practices and technologies are used to reach this goal, including real-time operational analytics, anomaly correlation, performance analysis and capacity management.
• Act: Apply automation and improved collaboration through chat and user-friendly dashboards. This includes applying intelligent automation, predictive workload automation, storage automation and resiliency measures—all with the goal of reducing the need for manual intervention and delivering an integrated automation solution across your hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Assess where you are in your AIOps journey

The journey to AIOps is incremental, and each customer will take a slightly different path. No matter where you start your journey to AIOps, taking an integrated hybrid approach backed by AI can help you streamline operations for greater efficiency, unlock the power of data and deliver true business value.