Intelligent IT Operation Analytics (ITOA)

IT Operations Analytics (ITOA) is a term that describes analytical and statistical methods applied to data concerning IT operations. Gartner Group’s Hype Cycle Report rates the business impact of ITOA as ‘high’:

Effective use of ITOA methodologies brings businesses significant efficiency improvements and cost saving opportunities.

An Untapped Wealth of Information

Enterprise computing systems and data storage devices constantly generate a large volume of detailed performance and configuration data, which contains all the information needed to find and resolve almost any performance or availability incident in your datacenter.

ITOA solutions automatically recognize anomalies and see many correlations. This can be an effective way to detect symptoms of incidents that impact availability and service levels, and to show what areas are impacted. ITOA solutions also provide insight by visualizing this data in graphs and by showing trends. This is of great value because it automates data analyses that are unfeasible to do manually, thereby allowing the experts in the company to analyze much more data.

Predictive Value

However, standard ITOA tools do not contain any expert knowledge about the operating environment and infrastructure components. Consequently, they cannot show the real root cause of a problem, let alone detect a potential issue before any symptoms are triggered.

Early warning of an upcoming issue is obviously far more valuable to the business than identifying a problem that is already happening. And the signs are often already present in the raw data, well before an issue has any impact. But unfortunately this predictive data is well hidden, and only visible to an absolute expert doing a thorough analysis.

Such a proactive manual analysis is impossible to implement as a core IT management process, because there is simply not enough time in a day for any of the experts to analyze the details of every relevant area proactively.

Insight

It is clear that automating the data analysis is absolutely necessary because of the amount of data. But just analyzing the data with statistical methods is not sufficient, because it lacks context-specific insights. As Forrester research put it: “The tools present us with the raw data, and lots of it, but sufficient insight into the actual meaning buried in all that data is still remarkably scarce” (Turn Big Data Inward With IT Analytics, Forrester Research).

To unlock the predictive value that is hidden in the data, the data should not be treated as unstructured ‘big data’, but interpreted using detailed knowledge of the IT architecture and the meaning of each metric. This is exactly what IntelliMagic does.

Embedded Expert Knowledge

IntelliMagic has a long standing history of embedding platform-specific human expertise into its software. This is unique in the world.

IntelliMagic ITOA software contains deep knowledge on the architecture of the IT environments that it analyzes and a fundamental understanding of how workloads, logical components, and physical hardware interact. This enables IntelliMagic to show real issues, risks and root causes, as opposed to just flagging correlations and anomalies like other ITOA solutions.

A Thousand Pairs of Eyes

Using this embedded expertise, the raw data is turned into not just information, but intelligence. It is as if a thousand pairs of expert eyes are looking at the data. The results are summarized and rated so it is clear where to look, and the structured detailed repository with drill downs and explanations empowers experts as well as new users to find potential issues quickly, and to understand what they can do to resolve them. This saves many hours or even days of firefighting and root cause hunting, and significantly decreases the number of issues that impact application availability.