AIOps is a Gartner-supported concept of performance and infrastructure monitoring.
AIOps
AIOps stands for artificial intelligence for IT operations and entails collecting performance data from applications and the IT infrastructure (system software, compute, storage, network) they use. This is analysed using machine learning, statistical analysis, heuristics and expert systems to automatically detect and respond to issues in real time. The ultimate goal is self-driving applications and data centres.
Performance monitoring suppliers that used to look at infrastructure components such as network gear or storage kit, and others that looked at applications are now having to look at the whole application-infrastructure stack. The goal is to develop integrated offerings that use machine learning because human analysis is too difficult and slow for real time responses to issues.
HPE is developing InfoSight to cover the whole data centre, and its recent Primera array includes InfoSight AI models which predict application performance using an on-board AI workload fingerprinting and headroom analysis engine.
VMware’s Project Magna is also developing a self-tuning capability with hyperconverged systems’ vSAN as its testbed.
To further its AIOps ambitions Virtual Instruments has released v6.2 of the VirtualWisdom app and infrastructure performance management software.
VirtualWisdom v6.2
VW v6.2 discovers and maps applications to the infrastructure, to monitor a whole app stack’s performance as it relates to an SLA. It applies real-time, AI-based analytics through an updated Wisdom AI engine. It’s said to work across hybrid data centres, meaning ones on-premises and in the public cloud.
The release includes Dell EMC Isilon integrationm with more than 1500 metrics collected at 10-second intervals, and several other new features;
- Workload RightSizer – rightsizes VMs by scaling them up or down across an application, with settable policies for the amount of CPU and memory for each VM, host or cluster.
- Workload Drift Analyser – real-time alerts when application workload behaviour is anomalous or is the root-cause of observed performance issues.
- Predictive Capacity Management – Monitors, reports, forecasts and alarms against the capacity consumption rate with settable time period alerts before capacity exhaustion.
There was a supporting quote from Bob Laliberte, a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group; “Infrastructure issues must be resolved in near real-time to avoid impacting the business and its customers.”
Virtual Instruments CEO Philippe Vincent put out a prepared quote: “The future of IT operations is autonomous.”
VW v6.2 is not there yet but it is a little closer to delivering autonomy.
Our take
Blocks & Files thinks Virtual Instruments will need to partner with system vendors such as HPE and VMware, to integrate Virtual Wisdom with HPE’s InfoSight and VMware’s Project Magna so as to offer a heterogeneous AIOps capability.
Neither HPE’s nor VMware’s offerings will have the ability to look at third party-supplied app infrastructure components and that’s where Virtual Instruments and other external suppliers will be able to offer a helping hand.
VirtualWisdom 6.2 is available now.
