One of the biggest impediments faced by DevOps teams and IT industry today is the lack of ability to identify small, but potentially harmful issues within large streams of Big Data, that are logged in their environment.
There are more challenges to be observed with the IT and DevOps ecosystem. The pace at which technology, processes, and tool are changing has made it difficult for enterprises to cope with the IT and DevOps side of it.
Whenever any issue surfaces, an IT operations or a DevOps professionals usually have to comb through a sea of log entries to find critical events that led to the issue. A real-time, centralized log analytics system can help address such issues. Such systems help in comprehension of the essential aspects of the log data, besides identifying the critical issues.
Role of AI in streamlining IT and DevOps operations
IT operations continue to become agile and dynamic today, but that’s only the good part. As we move ahead into the future, IT processes are also turning immensely complex, making it a taxing task for human mind to keep up with the velocity, volume, and variety of Big Data streaming through daily operations.
This is where AI saves the day. The technology helps in filling the gaps between humans and Big Data. DevOps and IT professionals gain the required operational intelligence and speed to tackle the burden of troubleshooting and real-time decision-making.
Essentially, organizations hunt for a solution that could help IT and DevOps teams to quickly find problems in the mountain of log data entries. The work would be much simplified, if the teams could easily identify the log entry reflecting error. Besides, it would also help in saving time.
Enterprises can leverage Artificial Intelligence to tackle this issue. A platform that can collate data from the internet about all kinds of related incidents, observe how people using similar setups resolve them in their systems, and scan through your system to identify the potential problems can act as a remedy to this problem. The platform should be able to mimic how a user investigates, monitors, and troubleshoots events. This AI can help the system gain an understanding about how humans interact with data, instead of trying to analyze the data itself.
Cognitive Insights helps streamline IT and DevOps operations
Lately, the term “Cognitive Insights” has been gaining a lot of momentum within technology circles. The technology utilizes machine-learning algorithms to match human domain knowledge with log data, open source repositories, discussion forums, and social thread.
Cognitive Insights system collects al this information and stores them in a data reservoir of relative insights. These insights can help businesses find solutions for a wide array of critical issues, faced by IT operations and DevOps teams daily.
How is Cognitive Insights helping enterprises?
As mentioned earlier, DevOps and IT teams across an organization usually have to deal with various obstacles. However, artificial intelligence technology can act as a remedy to tackle all these issues. AI can be easily integrated in log files and related operations. Cognitive Insights is a highly scalable platform that helps enterprise address their IT and DevOps requirements by leveraging AI. Some of these impediments are as follows:
Security: Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks were earlier limited to governments, high-profile websites, and multinational organizations. However, the number of these attacks have proliferated today significantly. Furthermore, prominent individuals, SMBs, and mid-sized enterprises are also exposed to the risk of such attacks today.
A centralized logging architecture is crucial for identifying suspicious activities and pinpointing the potential threats from thousands of entries. Moreover, this will help in warding off DDoS attacks. Cognitive Insights has been proven to be highly effective for anti-DDoS mitigation. Dyn and British Airways have already installed a full-fledged, ELK-based anti-DDoS mitigation strategy. This not only helps keep hackers at bay, but also helps secure operations from any attacks in future.
IT Operations: Enterprises prefer their logs to be a one place, with each entry cautiously monitored and registered. This helps them in viewing the process flow clearly. Besides, it provides them with the ability to execute queries related to logs from different applications, all from one place. It eventually adds up to increasing the efficiency of the IT operations.
However, IT and DevOps teams struggle with identifying the small yet potentially harmful issues in large streams of log data in their environment. Cognitive Insights’ is based upon an ELK stack core, which help in sorting and simplifying the data. Asurion and Performance Gateway are few organizations that have leveraged Cognitive Insights to transform their IT game.
Benefits of leveraging AI-based platform
Cognitive Insights’ AI-driven log analytics system makes it easy for businesses to find the most trivial of issues, and solve them efficiently. Thus, these systems have a significant impact on management and operations across the entire organization. Some of the benefits are enlisted below:
- Risks are reduced and resource optimization is considered
- The customer success rates are improved remarkably
- The platform helps in monitoring, besides facilitating customer support
- Logging data is made accessible, which helps in maximizing efficiency.
Case Study: Rent-A-Car leverages AI for its IT operations
The Texas-based Rent-A-Center (RAC) was facing trouble in integrating ELK stacks. The organization tried integrating two different ELK stacks, however, handling 100GB data every day was too much of a hassle for the firm. Moreover, the exorbitant cost and time spent every day for disk management, memory tuning, additional data input capabilities, and other technical issues discouraged RAC even more.
The Fortune 1000 company that offers a wide range of rent-to-own products and services. It has over 3000 stores and 2000 kiosks spread across Mexico, Puerto Rico, Canada, and United States.
With Cognitive Insights, RAC gained the ability to easily detect future anomalies, besides easily being able to scale the constantly growing volume of data. The firm benefitted from a dedicated IT team managing on-premise and off-premise ELK stacks.
Outlook
Proactive research and testing in the AI landscape across several avenues is what defines the space today. Vendors are focusing towards enhancing the efficiency of data log management systems.
The growth in the adoption of ELK is encouraging more and more vendors to offer logging solutions. Today, companies are increasingly installing such setup without incurring any overburdening upfront expense.
Besides, these systems allow users to perform basic graphing and searching capabilities. Organizations can utilize the most recent technologies, for say, Cognitive Insights to identify issues in the haystack of log data.
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