Change is a constant source of stress on enterprise networks, whether as a result of network expansion, the ever-increasing pace of new technology, internal business shifts, or external forces beyond an enterprise’s control.
When change occurs, organizations might not have the capabilities or resources in place to maintain performance across their networks, infrastructure, and applications.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, many businesses didn’t have a networking infrastructure that could cope with this near-sudden switchover to deliver and manage IT services for remote workers. Some companies rushed to assemble solutions, and this led to problems such as security blind spots, unreliable network performance, and delays in issue resolution.
Gain comprehensive network visibility
One of the most powerful use cases for artificial intelligence (AI) in operations is visibility into the entire enterprise infrastructure as a whole – not just separate views of servers, databases, or networks. A system’s ability to correctly identify the root cause and quickly direct experts where they need to go to correct issues is a huge return on investment on AIOps.
Say a fiber optic cable gets damaged and creates a connection issue between a switch and a storage device. In a typical environment where you have different layers of monitoring, you would expect alerts from the network management platform, the storage management system, the application management tool, and your database monitor. Yet all these failures come down to the same root cause – a failed switch connection.
A system with comprehensive visibility understands how your applications work, how system components are connected, and where networks fit into your overall infrastructure. Getting fewer alerts, quick and accurate root cause analysis, and tickets to the right team ultimately reduces mean-time-to-detection (MTTD), as well as mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR). Businesses reduce operating costs by having fewer people involved in uncovering why something went wrong and less labor spent resolving issues.
The business benefits are significant: Network observability simplifies administration, optimizes network performance, and improves business results (see Network Efficiencies box). Comprehensive visibility powers the automation of network admin tasks, efficiently and with accuracy. The right platform has observability baked-in and is easy to use, eliminating alert fatigue, expediting issue resolution, and automating performance optimization with little user interaction.
| Network Efficiencies
A large US healthcare services provider* has achieved incredible results, thanks to network visibility: $4M: annual downtime cost avoidance 90%: reduction in daily alert volume 80%: reduction in IT staff training time 61%: reduction in mean-time-to-repair *Source: Netreo; read more here |
When network visibility is integrated with an AIOps platform like BMC Helix, the system consolidates not only networking data but also key data from a huge array of monitoring tools, including ticket history, incident reports, knowledge articles from service management tools, and more. Then the information is correlated and analyzed to provide practical suggestions and predictive insights. A platform with these powerful AI capabilities allows organizations to prevent network incidents and make more efficient use of staff time and resources.
A path to rapid resolution and prevention
AIOps is at the core of BMC Helix, a platform that allows IT and networking teams to gain holistic insights, enhance root-cause analysis, and automate remediation – all to reduce overall operations management and labor costs.
BMC Helix offers comprehensive visibility across enterprise infrastructure, dynamically detecting, identifying, and resolving issues, while learning from past incidents. For example, BMC Helix provides best action recommendations by analyzing past problem artifacts and resolutions to not only suggest new resolutions, but also automatically generate code to fix issues. The functionality also identifies and routes the situation to the right people or teams, who can review the recommendations and act. Those resolutions can then be added into automation to speed up future resolutions.
| Intelligent automation that avoids cost and toil
BMC Helix customers can achieve game-changing results. One DevOps and site reliability engineering team has reported: $669,000: projected cost savings this year with automation and remediation 3,680: successful remediations from seven intelligent automations within one month The customer said these benefits were thanks to BMC innovations, including: Top manual runbooks used by network operations center converted to automations Two additional automations helped with: Bottleneck mitigations Remediation of long-running database queries improving performance Seven automations currently in place |
At the end of the day, BMC Helix helps businesses where it matters most: increasing customer satisfaction, enabling the ability to expand service offerings, and helping to achieve consistent growth and stability.
Learn more about how automated network observability fits into your overall AIOps strategy. Visit here for more information or contact BMC.
