AIOps Operating Model

As application landscape is becoming increasingly complex with multi-cloud and hybrid environments, the enterprise maturity model needs to evolve from chaotic to reactive to proactive and predictive levels. Data is at the heart of this transition and Robotic Data Automation Fabric is paramount for this transformation. Cisco along with its portfolio of Appdynamics, Thousand Eyes and Intersight and along with top tier partners like CloudFabrix is well positioned to meet these challenges.

IT is no longer a supporting function; IT is at the center stage of the digital ecosystem and is increasingly driving business value. The client's solution stack is becoming extremely complex with On-Prem, Hybrid, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS deployment models and AIOps is paramount to move to an Intelligent AI driven IT solution. IBM has comprehensive AIOps framework to discover, observe, analyze, prescribe using an open technology stack. We boast a wide ecosystem of partner solution including CloudFabrix and remediation and visualization solutions using IBM Technology such as Instana and Turbonomics.

As our customers are going through their Digital transformation, several of the applications are getting redesigned to be cloud native with IaaS, PaaS, serverless as their hybrid underlying platforms. They are thus losing the visibility they had with their monolithic static application stacks, not to mention the deluge of data. This is driving the need for AIOps and why we have decided to partner with CloudFabrix. Additionally building trust in AIOps boils down to defining KPI's and measuring the success against these KPI's whether they be improving MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution), Incident management, improving productivity and this begins with the data quality at hand

CloudFabrix will help to tell me where I have to refresh the infrastructure for performance and asset management reasons, three to five years out. And if I need to refresh part of the infrastructure, CloudFabrix showed me the cost in terms of capital and operational expenditures. I could just plug in a number, targeting 500 assets per year and CloudFabrix would provide all the relevant data. It is amazing!

CloudFabrix helps us to identify incident outliers, to better understand if it’s a repeated offense. We can review incidents over the same day, the last week, the last six months, or twelve months, or whatever timeframe is a priority, and see what’s been repeated and what’s not. We can also see what the root cause analysis for the incidents were and map these to changes made and code revisions across the infrastructure.

When I was pursuing my use cases for network and data center planning, I already knew that CloudFabrix could serve more of our stakeholders. When we introduced it to engineering and operations, they found more and more value, for instance in real-time incident and problem management, where CloudFabrix does a lot of magic in the background to put incidents in context. We’re increasingly hearing, ‘I don’t need to dedicate my people to a waste of manual effort. This tool can do it!

cfxCloud delivers strong value in the assimilation of preexisting monitoring and other toolset investments, so insights can be visualized more cohesively and more dynamically. Using cfxCloud, we exceeded what their vendors could do significantly—integrate both event and metric data and reduce the lag from two to three minutes to less than three seconds.

Above all, what we liked about cfxCloud was the fact that it was outcomes-driven. Rather than just looking proactively at different data, which was itself of value, with cfxCloud we were able to take that up a level and relate what was happening to business outcomes and business objectives. That was good for our business because most CIOs we sell to are focused on business outcomes.