Agencies are moving from solely in-house environments to models that include cloud services and on-premises infrastructure and systems. Technology upgrades and new deployments are happening faster.
These factors increase management demands for IT engineers as they ensure high-quality digital services.
A new approach to IT management, provided by an observability solution, can help agencies overcome these hurdles. Observability — especially when enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI) — offers a comprehensive level of visibility, insights, and capabilities to match the evolving needs of IT teams.
Traditional Tools Can’t Keep Up
IT management relies on several different, siloed solutions, each focused on a particular function, system, or application. For IT teams, the limitations of traditional management tools include:
- Difficulty in obtaining a complete and coherent view of issues across the entire infrastructure
- Repetitive and uncorrelated alerts that make it hard to identify the true nature and root cause of issues
- Problem-solving that requires too many tools and manual analyses
The Observability Difference
An observability solution, such as the cloud-based SolarWinds®️Platform, is crucial for today’s IT environments, which might include on-premises, hybrid, or multicloud components.
Observability solutions provide insight into all IT areas, including networks, systems, and applications, as well as security and compliance. Observability shows the “why” behind a problem — not just the “what.” IT staff gain a single, consolidated view of the entire technology infrastructure, even as it grows in scale and complexity. Teams can easily share insights to quickly understand and resolve problems. Continual monitoring allows IT to implement stronger measures for security and data protection.
Engineers spend less time solving routine problems and can focus more on proactive efforts to maintain IT service levels and deploy high-priority projects.
Agencies save costs by replacing older, function-specific tools. And holistic insights from an observability platform allow for more effective planning to improve IT performance, availability, efficiency, and capacity.
How AI Enhances Observability
AI-driven operations (AIOps) is an emerging concept for improving IT management. AIOps uses technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. These technologies can be trained to rapidly interpret and correlate historical data, then forecast trends or make predictions.
An AIOps-powered analysis increases understanding of an IT environment’s overall health. It can also reduce time to detect and resolve specific issues, especially those that are recurring or common to multiple elements or systems.
AI technology and an observability solution can work together in a synergistic way. With its broad view of the IT environment, observability offers data that helps AI produce relevant insights. These insights then help IT teams make better-informed decisions for current operations and future planning.
Observability in Use
Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas uses a SolarWinds® solution to monitor its network services, firewall, routers, primary servers, critical applications, and remote cloud systems.
With this deployment, the airport has seen:
- Faster resolution of network issues and anomalies
- More accurate data reporting
- Higher staff productivity
- Cost savings
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