What is AIOps?

The term AIOps was coined by Gartner in 2017, and stands for “artificial intelligence for IT operations”. AIOps uses the combination of big data and machine learning to solve common challenges of IT operations.

The Challenges of IT Operations Management

IT teams are responsible for designing, configuring, and managing all of an organization’s IT systems. Some of the common challenges that IT operations management faces in modern corporate networks include:

• Complex Networks: Modern corporate networks are growing rapidly and incorporate a wide range of systems and platforms. This makes IT operations and security management difficult because each system and platform must be configured to ensure security and performance.
• Data Overload: Optimizing and managing IT operations requires the ability to make data-driven decisions. However, the scale and complexity of modern networks can overwhelm analysts and make it difficult to collect, process, and analyze the necessary data.
• Unscalable Management: As corporate networks grow larger, manually configuring and managing these systems quickly becomes unscalable. As a result, systems may be left in insecure default configurations or be slow to receive important functionality and security updates.

How AIOps Solves These Challenges

These challenges of AIOps largely boil down to having more data than an organization can effectively collect, process, and act upon. Without tools that are capable of processing and analyzing large volumes of data, critical information is overlooked.

AIOps solves these challenges by bringing the power of machine learning and big data to bear on these IT operations management challenges. AIOps collects data from multiple sources across the organization’s network, simplifies analysis of this data, and enables an organization to act on derived insights at scale.

What is an AIOps Platform?

An AIOps platform is a system designed to apply AIOps to IT operations management. Some of the key capabilities of such a platform include:

• Collecting data in various formats from multiple sources.
• Analyzing real-time or historical data to extract useful insights.
• Using machine learning to process collecting data.
• Automatically acting upon insights extracted from data analysis.

AIOps Use Cases

AIOps platforms are designed to solve the challenges of IT operations management. Some common use cases for AIOps include:

• Event Correlation: While individual events or alerts may be false positives or benign anomalies, multiple related events have a higher probability of indicating a true issue. AIOps platforms use machine learning to group related alerts, reducing overall alert volumes and drawing attention to the events most likely to require action.
• IT Service Management: IT service management (ITSM) is the cradle-to-grave management of IT services within an organization from initial design to long-term management. AIOps aids ITSM by providing the data and context that IT service support professionals require to effectively diagnose and remediate any issues with an organization’s IT services.
• Automation: IT teams are responsible for managing growing network infrastructures and processing and acting upon a deluge of event and alert data. AIOps systems can automate the process of collecting and aggregating data from multiple sources within an organization’s network. IT and security automation enable more rapid detection, investigation, and remediation of potential incidents.

Benefits of AIOps

AIOps is designed to leverage data from multiple sources and advanced analytics to improve IT operations. Some of the key benefits that an AIOps platform can provide to an organization include:

• Greater Visibility: An AIOps platform collects data from sources across the corporate network and aggregates and analyzes it. This provides greater visibility into corporate IT infrastructure because it enables the IT team to make use of data sources that might otherwise be overlooked due to silos or the difficulty of collecting them.
• Data-Driven Insights: Data collection and analysis are core capabilities that define an AIOps platform. With AIOps, an organization can make decisions about the design, implementation, and management of IT architecture based on real-time or historical data about the usage of the corporate network.
• Rapid Event Response: IT teams are commonly overwhelmed by more data and alerts than they can process, which slows incident detection and response. AIOps platforms offer real-time data analytics and event correlation that enable IT teams to quickly identify, investigate, and respond to events.

AIOps with Check Point

AIOps platforms improve the efficiency and effectiveness of IT teams by collecting and processing information from across an organization’s IT environment. For this to be possible, a company needs to be able to integrate all of its IT systems using application programming interfaces (APIs). With Check Point APIs, software developers can write code to integrate Check Point security products with their AIOps platform to gather data for processing, monitoring their security infrastructure and responding to incidents when they occur.

In addition, Check Point PRO Support leverages AIOps to provide companies with proactive support for their IT and business needs. Round-the-clock monitoring of their Check Point security with preemptive incident detection prevents issues from causing significant IT downtime. Learn more about how PRO Support can improve your IT operations management by signing up for a free trial.