In the age of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, we find more IT depart­ments lean­ing toward using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence for IT oper­a­tions (AIOps) to help man­age the increas­ing demands on IT teams.

This blog post — which is the first in a series — starts by expand­ing on the ben­e­fits of AIOps and address­ing three key pain points that IT oper­a­tions and BASIS admin­is­tra­tion teams expe­ri­ence every day. In all three of these sce­nar­ios, adopt­ing AIOps can lead to a dra­mat­ic reduc­tion in inci­dent mean time to res­o­lu­tion (MTTR).

What Is AIOps?

AIOps is a cat­e­go­ry of cloud-based soft­ware sys­tems that apply arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) to trans­form IT oper­a­tions. An AIOps plat­form rede­fines the process­es and tasks asso­ci­at­ed with man­ag­ing the IT inci­dent life cycle. It also helps sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduce busi­ness dis­rup­tions by increas­ing sys­tem avail­abil­i­ty, min­i­miz­ing man­u­al and error-prone work relat­ed to per­for­mance mon­i­tor­ing and inci­dent root cause analy­sis. It also pre­pares teams to resolve prob­lems in a proac­tive and auto­mat­ed way. In SAP oper­a­tions envi­ron­ments, AIOps can com­ple­ment SAP Solu­tion Man­ag­er by replac­ing and mod­ern­iz­ing tech­ni­cal mon­i­tor­ing and alert­ing, pro­vid­ing an end-to-end solu­tion for SAP per­for­mance and avail­abil­i­ty optimization.

Pain Point 1: Man­ag­ing Alert Fatigue

The first key pain point that an AIOps solu­tion address­es is alert fatigue result­ing from the vol­ume and vari­ety of alerts gen­er­at­ed by SAP Solu­tion Man­ag­er and a het­ero­ge­neous set of lega­cy tools to mon­i­tor a grow­ing land­scape of sys­tems and solu­tion stack lay­ers. Nine­ty per­cent of alerts are ignored, despite the risk they will neg­a­tive­ly affect team pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and MTTR. To pre­vent teams from pre­ma­ture­ly act­ing on the wrong alerts and dis­miss­ing con­se­quen­tial warn­ings, SAP Solu­tion Man­ag­er pro­vides sim­ple group­ings of met­rics and alerts to con­trol ​“alert flood­ing.” Yet it relies on sta­t­ic thresh­olds and lim­it­ed (recent) data sets to gen­er­ate alerts and deter­mine anomalies.

AIOps uses machine learn­ing to gen­er­ate behav­ior pro­files and dynam­ic thresh­olds to detect real anom­alies. Mod­ern behav­ior pro­fil­ing dis­cov­ers, col­lects, con­sol­i­dates, and per­forms sta­tis­ti­cal and text analy­sis on a com­pre­hen­sive array of per­for­mance behav­ior data types across the full stack and com­plete sys­tem land­scape. Dynam­ic alert thresh­olds, in con­trast to sta­t­ic thresh­olds, self-adjust based on known or expect­ed dri­vers of sys­tem behav­ior. Rather than being deter­mined by SAP rec­om­mend­ed default val­ues and man­u­al­ly adjust­ed over time, alerts are based on con­tin­u­ous mon­i­tor­ing of and learn­ing from actu­al per­for­mance behav­ior and can be trig­gered based on scor­ing that con­sid­ers fac­tors like mag­ni­tude, fre­quen­cy, and clustering.

In sum, AIOps can com­ple­ment and extend what is pos­si­ble with SAP Solu­tion Man­ag­er in the area of tech­ni­cal mon­i­tor­ing and alert­ing with a more holis­tic and robust approach to detect­ing anom­alies. Your team won’t get flood­ed with mean­ing­less alerts and you can man­age real poten­tial trou­ble on an excep­tion basis.

Pain Point 2: Mak­ing Sense of SAP Sys­tem Data

The sec­ond key pain point is mak­ing sense of the data that SAP sys­tem logs and lega­cy het­ero­ge­neous mon­i­tor­ing tools col­lect to iso­late the root cause of sys­tem per­for­mance prob­lems. For most IT teams, the pain starts ear­ly in this process, as it is fre­quent­ly not clear where to begin and who to involve in an inci­dent inves­ti­ga­tion. The process typ­i­cal­ly involves nav­i­gat­ing and mar­shal­ing spe­cial­ist resources includ­ing admin­is­tra­tors, solu­tion archi­tects, devel­op­ers, solu­tion stack com­po­nent experts, infra­struc­ture ser­vices spe­cial­ists, busi­ness process/​functional experts, and sup­port process stake­hold­ers. In fact, it’s not uncom­mon for your root cause analy­sis ​“tiger teams” or ​“war rooms” to involve fif­teen individuals.

AIOps can com­ple­ment SAP Solu­tion Man­ag­er with an effi­cient and repeat­able process for inci­dent con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion. AIOps accel­er­ates root cause analy­sis by pro­vid­ing inci­dent con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion based on log ana­lyt­ics and machine learn­ing algo­rithms that ana­lyze met­ric cor­re­la­tion, inci­dent co-occur­rence, and sea­son­al­i­ty effects. As a result, you are no longer behold­en to spe­cial­ist trib­al knowl­edge. An SAP domain-aware AIOps solu­tion will link prob­a­ble root caus­es to the SAP knowl­edge base of sug­gest­ed best prac­tices and reme­di­a­tion actions. This focus­es the reme­di­a­tion process on a nar­row­er set of reme­di­a­tion options, poten­tial­ly lead­ing to faster resolution.

Pain Point 3: Tri­al-and-Error Remediation

The third key pain point is the frus­tra­tion asso­ci­at­ed with tri­al-and-error reme­di­a­tion. Using the ​“curat­ed” set of reme­di­a­tion options avail­able with AIOps solu­tions, IT teams can leave their frus­tra­tions behind as they adopt an auto­mat­ed and proac­tive work­flow. This work­flow can include rules-dri­ven team mobi­liza­tion that auto­mates poli­cies for rout­ing reme­di­a­tion actions while inte­grat­ing with your IT Ser­vice Man­age­ment (ITSM) activ­i­ties as need­ed. Reme­di­a­tion work­flow stan­dard­izes com­mu­ni­ca­tion across teams for tasks like apply­ing, test­ing, and report­ing on fix­es — dis­trib­ut­ing these com­mu­ni­ca­tions in real time through inte­gra­tions with col­lab­o­ra­tion tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. And closed-loop learn­ing feeds infor­ma­tion about what worked and what didn’t back into your knowl­edge base, help­ing improve your auto­mat­ed rec­om­men­da­tions over time.

Why Use AIOps?

The abil­i­ty of AIOps to trans­form anom­aly detec­tion, data con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion, and prob­lem res­o­lu­tion shrinks the time and effort required to detect, under­stand, and resolve inci­dents. With AIOps, you will not only crush your MTTR met­rics, but elim­i­nate frus­trat­ing rou­tines and mun­dane man­u­al process­es. You’ll be able to refo­cus your ener­gy and tal­ent on high­er-val­ue func­tions like plan­ning and inno­va­tion, help­ing increase your team’s job satisfaction.

In the next post, we’ll cov­er the com­pelling busi­ness dri­vers for an AIOps plat­form.

If you’re attend­ing SAP TechEd, reg­is­ter for the ASUG Pre-Con­fer­ence Sem­i­nar, ​“Hands-on with SAP Solu­tion Man­ag­er: Adopt­ing the Best End-to-End Strat­e­gy to Tran­si­tion to SAP S/4HANA,” Sept. 23 in Las Vegas. You can also join us for the ASUG and SAP Solu­tion Man­ag­er Sum­mit Nov. 5 – 7 in New­town Square, Penn­syl­va­nia. Addi­tion­al­ly, we wel­come all ASUG mem­bers to sub­mit their ideas for blog posts they want to write.