Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 42 | Page 53

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// FEATURE: AI Ian Jansen van Rensburg, VMware EMEA Senior Systems Engineer To address this issue, teams should emphasise the importance of linking data so that relationships are recorded and easily identifiable. A standardised naming policy can help keep companies from forking off new silos of data. Maximise the investment AIOps promises to tackle some of the toughest IT issues, but there are core organisational issues that teams will need to address before they can realise that value. is to assess its quality. Common problems that we see in the field today include noisy data, inconsistent or insufficient reporting frequencies, and even inconsistent naming policies across applications or data centres. Organisations should develop procedures for standardising and filtering data collection, as well as identifying the types of data that are most valuable for their specific priorities. Adopting procedures based on this shared understanding will provide value now and in the future. transaction rate’ represent a per-second, per-minute, or per-hour rate? And was the choice made here applied consistently across other related metrics? As another example, if data is being collected from a microservice that’s running within a container that’s running on a VM that’s running on a physical host, is the data tagged at all levels so that behaviour at one level can be correlated and compared to other levels? Otherwise, enterprise data can resemble a series of siloed, parallel universes. Because some of the most common problems organisations encounter when it comes to AIOps integration are found in the quantity, quality, and interpretation of their data, the first critical step – before jumping into an AIOps solution – is to take a meaningful assessment of existing IT systems and use cases. That includes the collection methods, business motivations, and contextual meaning behind the data. By building a foundation of robust data infrastructure and clear use case identification, companies will find that their future AIOps investment will not only deliver what it promised but also provide ongoing additional value that wasn’t even expected. n Problem 4: Meaning of data Companies can collect abundant amounts of high-quality data, but without the right context, the data is nearly useless. Data points that lack semantic definition or consistency are less valuable for both human operators and AIOps – for example, do the values of a given metric like ‘user www.intelligentcio.com EVEN THE MOST POWERFUL AIOPS TOOLS CAN BE IMPAIRED IF THEY DON’T HAVE ENOUGH DATA TO PROCESS. INTELLIGENTCIO 53