Towards Automated Ops

In the Digital Era, the experience your business delivers is crucial for success and competitiveness. Your customers, partners, and stakeholders expect this experience to be unfaltering – any disruption can lead to dissatisfaction and losses. 

If you imagine your business to be a complex network of interconnected systems and processes, then your digital infrastructure is its backbone, supporting everything from communication and data storage to customer interactions and transactions. For the experience your business delivers to be unfaltering, your digital infrastructure must be unfaltering. But as you well know, that isn’t so easy.

Unlike a digital-native company, your digital infrastructure is perhaps inherited and evolved over the years. It is heterogeneous and has several moving parts. The architecture though integrated perhaps is influenced by organizational structures with several silos of ownership and management. You have invested in its reliability, but you know that it is not as resilient and anti-fragile as you like. There is tech debt that limits its agility and ability to be a true enabler of business.

What if your IT systems could be made resilient? To seamlessly adapt, optimize, and secure themselves without constant manual oversight? This is the promise of Automated Ops – a game-changer that aligns technology with your business goals in unprecedented ways.

 

Automated Ops

Automated Ops turns conventional automation thinking on its head. Instead of focusing on what efficiencies can be brought to manual operations via automation, Automated Ops asks the question of what operations would be like if they were fully automated.

However, the real starting point is that unfaltering experience. To genuinely deliver something that is always-on, performant, reliable yet agile enough to release new business capabilities rapidly, Digital Infra needs to be rethought. Not redeveloped but rethought.

 

Unfaltering Experiences with Digital Infrastructure

• Includes every operation, service, application instance, data, network, or security element that is involved in the delivery of the experience. We would love this to be homogenous and resilient, but in practice, it is heterogeneous and fragile. Sure, we would like to rebuild this from scratch and get to Google-like reliability. Yet you know this cannot be done – some changes yes, but rip and replace, perhaps not. 
• Instead, what we can do, is two-fold. One, we wrap your digital infrastructure in a highly automated operational envelope and two, we bring in a few transformations to make it more software-defined.
• Together this makes your Infra more resilient, quick to heal, and adaptive. So, transformation AND automation, together and reinforcing one another.

 

Let us drill down a bit more. What are we trying to achieve?

Well, here are some objectives.

• Can we detect 50% of potential incidents before they happen and ward them off?
• When something breaks, can we reduce the time business is impacted by an order of magnitude?
• Can we release new changes and features with zero downtime?
• Can we reduce incidents that are downstream effects of changes?
• Can we guarantee that your environment is always compliant?

Yes, we can. All of those and more.

Automated Ops is about bringing together full-stack observability and actions/change as transactions using hyper-automation with an enterprise service management center.

Let us simplify that. Observability is about detecting and helping diagnose any behavior within digital infra that impacts experience. To precisely identify what is wrong and where.

Actions or for that matter any change in the automated ops way of thinking is implemented as code. Other than temporal actions that for example, cycle a process, all other actions change the configuration state of a system. Change the deployed infrastructure, its configuration, or the policies that govern it. When we apply transaction semantics to actions, an action always leaves a system in a consistent state.

Hyper Automation is about intelligent playbooks. If observability claims that a system is in a certain state, what diagnostics will verify this and what actions should we execute to bring the system back to a desired state.

Finally, ESM is the human interface to automated ops. It is where users post service requests, where you see detailed analytics of the health of your system, and where operations engineers step in to resolve scenarios that automated ops hasn’t learned yet.

This is Automated Ops.

 

 

 

Transformation

Observability is about making your environment observable – so that potential issues can be detected and diagnosed faster. However, observability is directly impacted by the data or telemetry that is available to it. If you can give us workload-relevant metrics, rich logs, and any changes from every part of your system, that would be awesome. If you cannot, as is often the case, we help tune your monitoring stack, implement APM, or inject telemetry to make observability meaningful.

In much the same way, if a change of any kind has to be thought of as changes to code, then your infrastructure, configuration, and policies must be represented as code. If you are already in a containerized and cloud-hosted world, it is easy. The more 'legacy' your infrastructure is, the harder it is to represent it as code. Wherever you are in between these extremes, we help you transform to be more software-defined at any and every layer of your stack.

 

 

 

Intelligeni Insights

• Persona-based dashboards
• Deep analytics with strategic and granular insights
• Providing intelligent views of patterns across relevant KPIs, service disruptions, and trends

Intelligeni Observe

• Graph-based algorithms and anomaly detection for hard-to-detect problems.
• Automatically triggers a set of diagnostic and remediation actions.
• ChatOps for engineers to collaborate and resolve issues.

Intelligeni Center

• Leverages either a fully hosted ServiceNow or Microland’s SmartCenter
• Combined with Microland-developed bots-based ITOM, DevSecOps, managed change pipeline
• Pre-built business and IT workflows

Intelligeni Bots

• Bots-based automated incident remediation, self-service change/service requests
• Automating repetitive tasks and IT workflows
• Infra/config/policy as code including NetDevOps

 

Intelligeni, how does it work? 

 

 

Read More

Intelligeni enables Automated Ops. An AI-powered unified platform that brings together observability to proactively detect and diagnose issues, Change managed as code, hyper-automation of complex workflows, and service management with deep analytics. The heart of Intelligeni is a knowledge graph that is an accurate and real-time representation of the structure and behavior of your digital infrastructure – the kind of intelligence normally known to a few engineers. Surrounding the knowledge graphs is a set of machine learning and graph-based algorithms and an embedded LLM that detects anomalies, learns behaviors, identifies root cause events, and drives automated diagnostics and remediation.

• Intelligeni Observe interfaces with your monitoring landscape for the discovery and ingestion of data including metrics, logs, and events from every single system. The Observe algorithms detect anomalies, coalesce connected signals to generate meaningful alerts, and compute the impact of alerts on the health of systems and services. But it doesn’t stop there – Observe also tracks every change that happens to your environment, learns behaviors, and identifies root cause elements. Observe is also loaded with a powerful set of diagnostics that rapidly identify issues anywhere in the infra stack.
• Intelligeni Bots are a set of battle-tested automation agents that can be triggered either automatically from Intelligeni Observe or Center or by operations engineers that implement diagnostic, remedial, and change-related tasks across cloud, compute, database, network, end-user, and security infrastructure.
• Intelligeni Center is a full-fledged ITSM product that is pre-configured with best practices. Intelligeni Center comes in two variants – one based on ServiceNow and the other based on Microland’s SmartCenter. In addition to managing all ITSM-related processes, Intelligeni Center also brings in smart algorithms to optimally manage workloads, end-user self-help portals, and a dynamic CMDB synced with the discovery and behavioral information from the knowledge graph in the Intelligeni Observe module.
• Intelligeni Insights has 16 pre-built dashboards and over 610 KPIs that provide unparalleled visibility into the health of your IT estate and ITSM processes. Intelligeni Insights consolidates data from multiple sources including Center, monitoring tools, ERP systems, and security tools to provide close to a real-time single pane of glass visibility.

 

Getting to Automated Ops is a journey and we will walk this with you. 

The Recipe for Success

Step 1: We start by stabilizing your operations and bringing in ITSM discipline and visibility.

Step 2: Then we strengthen monitoring and drive point automation.

Step 3: Over a series of transformation projects, we make your digital infrastructure more software-defined.

Step 4: In parallel, we move from monitoring to observability and from automation to as-code operations.

 

About the author:

Satish Sukumar

Senior Vice President, Global Head of Platforms

Satish comes with over 29 years of experience in the IT Industry. Over his career, he has held various leadership, technology, development, and support positions. His expertise is in the conceptualization, design, and creation of software products, in the architecture of large-scale distributed systems, and in running mission-critical systems in a highly automated manner. At Microland he leads the creation and development of Intelligent IT and Automation platforms.