Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) taps artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline and simplify information technology (IT) management. The technology collects data across increasingly complex IT infrastructure, identifying key patterns and events, and automating problem resolution. AIOps platforms typically relies on advanced analytics and machine learning tools to identify the root cause of issues and problems—and address them without human involvement.
In recent years, as data analytics has exploded and cloud computing has become commonplace, AIOps has gone mainstream. By 2023, 40% of DevOps teams will augment application and infrastructure monitoring tools with artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) platform capabilities, Gartner’s research noted. Currently, Gartner estimates the size of the AIOps platform market at between $300 million and $500 million per year.
The appeal of AIOps is straightforward. Gartner points out that these platforms enhance “decision making by contextualizing large volumes of varied and volatile data.” However, it also noted that while the space is advancing rapidly and adoption remains on the upswing, “AIOps platform maturity, IT skills and operations maturity are the chief inhibitors to rapid time to value.”
The upshot? It’s critical to understand what your business needs are and what value proposition vendors offer before committing to an AIOps platform.
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How to Choose an AIOps Company
If you’re in the market for an AIOps solution, here are some things to consider:
- A starting point for choosing a vendor and a specific solution is understanding how your current IT infrastructure can benefit from AIOps and what use case serves as a good starting point for replacing rules-based analytics with an automated framework of network diagnostics.
- Two general categories of AIOps exist: domain-centric platforms with built-in monitoring tools and domain-agnostic stand-alone solutions. Each has tools for ingesting events, metrics and traces. Understanding which delivers bigger benefits can clarify the vendor-selection process.
- It’s important to select a solution that has business-specific IT service management (ITSM) use cases revolving around task automation, knowledge management and change analysis.
- Successful implementations enable insights across IT operations management (ITOM) through three crucial aspects of AIOps, Gartner reports. These include observe, engage and act. Ensure that your organization understands how a solution fits—and connects to other tools—before finalizing vendor selection.
Top AIOps Companies
Here are 10 of the top vendors in the AIOps arena, along with some of their top features and selling points.
AppDynamics
Value Proposition: AppDynamics Central Nervous System ranks high among AIOps vendors with its broad and deep views into networks. Its parent company is Cisco Systems, though the solution works across numerous systems and frameworks. Top customers include Alaska Airlines, Paychex and Nasdaq. Gartner ranked AppDynamics among the “Leaders” in its 2020 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring. It also ranked as a “Leader” on the G2 Grid for AIOps Platforms and earned 4.2 out of 5 stars at G2 user ratings.
Summary: Central Nervous system focuses on three primary tasks: visibility, insights and action. It incorporates a cognition engine that delivers cross-domain visibility, insights and automation—along with automated anomaly detection and root cause analysis. This aids in reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR). A serverless APM shows relationships among applications, and promotes deep integrations across numerous partners. This allows users to gain an expansive view of application code and the underlying network. Cisco ACI and AppDynamics integration delivers insights into cloud infrastructure, including network-configured policies and automated security enforcement.
BigPanda
Value Proposition: The vendor has emerged as a popular choice in the AIOps space, with customers such as InterContinental Hotels Group, Foot Locker, United Airlines and Staples. It recently introduced what it describes as the “first Event Correlation and Automation platform powered by AIOps.” It focuses on gleaning insights and resolving IT issues across the entire IT stack and generating unified analytics. BigPanda received 4.1 out of 5 stars by users at G2.
Summary: BigPanda approaches AIOps through a “monitoring, change, and topology” framework that is part of an overall ITSM framework. It uses proprietary “open box” machine learning technology to spot, correlate and resolve problems. Key AIOps capabilities and features include: Open Integration Hub that collects, normalizes and enriches monitoring; Open Box Machine Learning; an operations console that handles bi-directional integrations; and unified analytics. The company claims that its machine learning component reduces noise by 95% or more while nearly eliminating false positives.
BMC
Value Proposition: BMC is a leading player in the AIOps space. It offers several products that map, log and manage IT infrastructure—and it has established partnerships with most major players in networking and clouds. The company’s open data access approach taps multiple data sources for historical and streaming data. Customers include Ingram, Boston Scientific, Carfax, Lockheed Martin and Vodafone. Its products rate receive good to excellent ratings from users at G2 and other rating sites.
Summary: The vendor’s Helix Monitor is an end-to-end service and operations platform that operates under as SaaS model and uses a data agnostic approach. The solution relies on a containerized, microservices architecture with open APIs and customizable dashboards. It is designed to provide broad monitoring and event management with integrated ITSM and ITOM. The vendor claims that its AIOps solutions reduce noise by about 90%, trim time to identify root cause by 60%, and slash event remediation MTTR by 75%. The company offers other tools, including TrueSite Operations Management, which taps machine learning (ML) and advanced analytics for more holistic monitoring and event management.
DataDog
Value Proposition: DataDog is a SaaS platform that delivers real-time application and IT monitoring along with log management and automation. It boasts major customers such as Peloton, 21st Century Fox, Samsung and Whole Foods Market. The company was ranked as a Forrester Wave Leader in the 2019 in the Intelligent Application and Service monitoring category. It’s also ranked as a “Leader” in the G2 Grid. The vendor receives 4.2 out of 5 stars at the G2 user ratings site.
Summary:Â The vendor supports visibility into all modern platforms and applications. It includes robust tools for monitoring, troubleshooting and optimizing performance. This includes log analysis that analyzes and explores data in context. The result is end-to-end proactive monitoring that detects and fixes performance issues through AI-powered self-maintenance tests. The platform also offers an assortment of tools to correlate frontend performance with business impact.
DynaTrace
Value Proposition: The vendor offers a full-stack and highly automated AIOps solution that includes Davis, an assistant that continually processes billions of events and dependencies in milliseconds using AI and open APIs. This allows it to identify IT problems and deliver more precise root analysis. Dynatrace AIOps customers include industry giants such as Kroger, Citrix and Experian. Gartner ranked the vendor a Magic Quadrant 2020 “Leader” for APM. The firm also ranked as a “Leader” in the G2 grid. It receives 4.5 out of 5 stars from users at G2.
Summary:Â DynaTrace offers several products designed to improve IT monitoring and performance. The AIOps platform, using Davis, takes an all-in-once approach that identifies precise root cause, tackles open ingestion, handles orchestration and addresses topology/dependencies across systems, including clouds and mainframes. The AIOps solution features auto discovery, advanced event analytics, anomaly detection and predictive capabilities. The AI assistant generates topology visualizations and business impact analysis data.
Moogsoft
Value Proposition: The company’s approach is built on an “advanced self-servicing AI-driven observability platform” that’s designed to deliver deep and real-time visibility into IT issues. The Moogsoft solution is designed for software engineers, developers and operations staff. Major customers include Qualcomm, Verizon Media, Fannie Mae and KeyBank. The solution is highly rated among users at G2, with 5.5 out of 5 stars.
Summary: Moogsoft provides a high level of automation for end-to-end events through its cloud-native AI and ML “Observability” platform. It collects data from numerous sources and events and correlates them through pattern discovery to deliver real-time insights. The solution is designed to identify root causes, use collaboration methods to ensure the right people receive notifications, and filter out noise and reduce alerts so that teams can tackle the most urgent matters. It delivers high automated remediation for proactive incident resolution.
New Relic
Value Proposition:Â New Relic focuses on applied intelligence, which aims to detect, understand, and resolve incidents faster through noise reduction and deeper insights. Major customers include American Eagle Outfitters, Hearst and H&R Block. New Relic APM receives a 4.3 out of 5-star rating from users at review site G2.
Summary:Â New Relic offers a comprehensive list of features for its AIOps platform. This includes availability testing, event logs, event-based notifications, performance metrics, real time monitoring, transaction monitoring, and uptime reporting. The platform offers automated anomaly detection, including highly flexible proactive detection through real-time failure warnings and deep incident intelligence. Applied intelligence offers guidance and analysis designed to speed incident resolution.
PagerDuty
Value Proposition: The company’s focus is on a single platform designed to keep digital systems running all the time and in perfect order. Cloud-native PagerDuty is built to work straight out of the box. It offers more than 370 integrations, including ServiceNow, Slack, Zendesk, AWS, Zoom and many others. Customers include American Express, BBC, Doordash and Netflix. PagerDuty is ranked as a “Leader” on the G2 Grid. It receives a 4.5 out of 5 stars at the G2 user rating site.
Summary: The platform offers powerful features, including on-call management, incident response, event intelligence and analytics. The Event Intelligence module reduces noise and directs insights to the right team for faster and better event resolution. The analytics feature uses pre-build metrics and prescriptive dashboards to deliver broader and deeper insights. The vendor boasts that data science knowledge isn’t needed.
ScienceLogic
Value Proposition: ScienceLogic Platform offers a rich array of IT infrastructure monitoring and remediation tools, including bandwidth monitoring, diagnostics, IP monitoring, real-time analytics resource management, server monitoring, SLA monitoring, uptime monitoring, and web traffic reporting. Major customers include AAA, Cisco, Kellogg’s, Telstra and the EPA. The company was ranked a “Leader” in the Forrester Wave IASM Q2 2019. It receives 4.3 out of 5 stars at the G2 review site.
Summary: The vendor focuses on a three-prong approach: see, contextualize and act. This includes powerful real-time discovery and contextualization capabilities. According to Forrester, ScienceLogic was the top-rated vendor in the intelligent application and service monitoring space for 2019. It noted that ScienceLogic is adept at “handling massive data aggregation and disparate architectures.” The vendor uses an algorithmic approach to build and search through a real-time data lake. This allows the platform to incorporate advanced automation, including run-book automation, predictive capacity allocation, and CMDB rationalization.
Splunk
Value Proposition:Â Splunk Enterprise collects, analyzes and acts on complex and disparate data generated by IT systems. Customers include Airbus, Dominos, Porsche and Cox Automotive. The vendor was ranked number one by Gartner in Market Share Analysis: ITOM, Performance Analysis Software, 2019 and earned 4.2 out of 5 starts at G2 user ratings.
Summary:Â Splunk uses machine learning, multi-site clustering and an open development platform to drive operational improvements within an organization. It boasts that it offers a data-to-everything platform designed to investigate, monitor, analyze and act. The framework ingests data from any structure, source and timescale, through AI and machine learning. It supports a broad range of users across the business as well as automated actions based on customized rules or AI-driven decision making. This promotes a framework with reduced IT complexity, 360-degree service visibility and preventative alerts with auto-remediation.
