 |
VOOZH | about |
|
VOOZH | about |
We’re so glad you’re here. You can expect all the best TNS content to arrive Monday through Friday to keep you on top of the news and at the top of your game.
Check your inbox for a confirmation email where you can adjust your preferences and even join additional groups.
Follow TNS on your favorite social media networks.
Become a TNS follower on LinkedIn.
Check out the latest featured and trending stories while you wait for your first TNS newsletter.
In the IT world, observability and IT service management (ITSM) have historically operated in silos. But as IT environments become increasingly complex and burdensome, IT teams need more than point solutions. They need their observability and ITSM tools, and the teams that use them, to communicate with one another to keep their ecosystems up and running.
Thankfully, in today’s age of AI and enriched data, new industry practices are bringing greater synergy to IT environments. And as a result, observability and ITSM services are moving closer to convergence. This shift will bring massive benefits to the IT operations (ITOps) space, enabling IT teams to reach unprecedented levels of efficiency and productivity.
Observability is the ability to measure and understand complex internal systems by examining their external outputs — analyzing metrics, logs, events and traces. The end goal of observability is to provide comprehensive insights and uncover unforeseen issues in ITOps. As modern IT infrastructures have grown in complexity, the industry has funneled time, money and effort toward improving observability tools and services.
But the promise of observability isn’t a cure-all for IT complexity. Observability is only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to providing effective service awareness and availability.
Take a look at the numbers: 91% of organizations report challenges when deploying observability solutions, according to Enterprise Strategy Group research. Why? Observability’s goal is to provide visibility and understanding of IT ecosystems. Too often, there’s a gap between observability’s services and the alerts that ITOps teams need to act upon. Teams can’t rely on observability services to provide the context that ITSM needs to streamline IT operations, such as prioritization, categorization, assignment or impact, which furthermore hinders any downstream automated incident resolution.
IT service management facilitates tasks and workflows associated with IT service delivery. It is the process of identifying, analyzing and resolving incidents to restore service operations as soon as possible. The role of ITSM is to minimize the impact of outages, increase productivity and prevent business-threatening disruption.
ITSM allows organizations to manage the delivery of IT services to their users, both internal employees and external customers. Think of it like this: Instead of IT being a mysterious black box, ITSM treats IT services like any other business offering. ITSM provides defined processes to design, create, deliver and support IT services. Successful ITSM solutions allow IT teams to align their services with business needs and deliver them efficiently.
On their own, ITSM tools can’t evaluate the whole picture and context of IT environments — and therefore, they are held back from reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) as effectively as possible. ITSM requires comprehensive observability insights, as well as operational characteristics of infrastructure, system mapping and business process rules, to respond to issues as they arrive to drive faster MTTR. At the enterprise level, ITSM processes are highly manual and dependent on large teams for regular upkeep and management. Streamlined ITSM is often unrealistic to achieve since current processes are complicated, inconsistent and lack the mandates needed to keep this database up to date.
Despite pouring millions of dollars into observability and ITSM platforms each year, IT teams still face the hurdles that have long impacted their operations: alert fatigue, reactive incident responses, incident outages, and persistent complaints about service availability and performance.
In its Incident Management and Prevention report, Enterprise Management Associates found that 69% of ITOps teams reported at least 25% of MTTR is inactive time spent waiting for more information or responses from other teams. That’s a concerning amount of time lost. Not to mention the additional hours teams spend when they receive irrelevant details and are forced to re-escalate tickets through multiple support levels to get the correct data.
It’s time to move into the modern world. ITOps needs a more holistic approach that goes beyond acting independently on observability or ITSM data.
As AI transforms ITOps, new technological capabilities are emerging to consolidate observability and ITSM solutions.
According to Gartner’s article, “Gartner Experts Answer the Top Generative AI Questions for Your Enterprise“: “By 2025, 30% of enterprises will have implemented an AI-augmented development and testing strategy, up from 5% in 2021.” The growing prevalence of generative AI (GenAI) will transform ITOps as it becomes operationalized and creates better synergies within IT stacks.
GenAI enables organizations to harmonize machine-generated, actionable alert and incident payload data with human ITSM data to enrich observability context. By merging observability and ITSM capabilities, automation can help IT teams extend beyond traditional limitations to enhance system understanding and enable proactive, informed decision-making.
With the convergence of observability and ITSM, the IT function as a whole stands to reap the benefits. Combined, observability and ITSM will unlock:
Bringing the best of observability and ITSM together empowers IT teams to shake off the burden of unneeded tools, reducing system complexity and costs. They will gain an unprecedented understanding of their systems and access to on-demand remediation tools.
With observability and ITSM working together, ITOps teams can address incidents quickly, provide better customer experiences and unlock time for digital transformation.
Disclaimer: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
