How to Use IT Operations Analytics?

Managing data is an important task for a business of any size, and enterprise-sized organizations handle massive amounts of it. Statistics suggest almost 65% of organizations manage at “least one petabyte” of data, with 41% of organizations managing a minimum of 500 petabytes.

Over the past two decades, it has become clear that data is a valuable and important asset. However, by the same token, the process of managing it has become quite complex, leading businesses to experience challenges as they try to sort through their enormous amounts of data. Furthermore, organizations must accurately identify useful pieces of data while maintaining compliance while simultaneously being cautious with the handling of any and all sensitive information.

IT operations analytics (ITOA) is a solution that can help businesses navigate the complexities of the IT environment. It can also facilitate organizations by helping them to analyze their IT systems and performance, empower their ability to diagnose problems and subsequently deploy IT resources in an efficient and effective manner. In this article, we’ll define ITOA, its benefits, key uses and best practices.

What is IT Operations Analytics? (ITOA)

ITOA is a tool leveraged by IT teams to analyze the large datasets generated by IT systems. It helps them to collect operational data to find patterns, identify anomalies, help them perform rapid incident management and, overall, provide better data-driven insights.

Historically, IT teams have had to be reactive when issues emerged. With the powerful capabilities of ITOA, organizations can now take a proactive approach to identifying and preventing problems. The IT ops analytics process helps improve IT operations management (ITOM) increasing effectiveness, speed and overall efficiency and reliability. It also provides organizations a way to:

• Optimize performance
• Deliver proactive problem resolutions
• Enjoy cost reductions
• Identify security issues
• Offer improved decision-making capabilities
• Provide an enhanced user experience.

Essentially, ITOA is a machine-learning-based analytical solution designed to help ensure a business’s systems are running at peak performance while anticipating potential problems by using historical and current events. Operational data can be collected by ITOA from application logs, performance metrics, network logs, network traffic, user activity, system alerts, hypervisors and other areas.

This way, problems can be predicted and the occurrence of outages reduced because they’ll know how to efficiently deploy IT resources when necessary.

Benefits of ITOA

Enterprises will find integrating ITOA into their processes provides numerous benefits. Examples include:

• Optimized systems performance
• Faster identification of problems
• Reduced downtime and other service interruptions
• An ability to prevent potential issues
• Proactive issue resolutions
• Improved data-driven decision-making
• Increased cost-effectiveness
• Improved resource allocation
• Better end-user experience

Overall, ITOA can provide increased operational efficiency while optimizing computer resource utilization.

Importance of Utilizing ITOA

Enterprise-sized companies and other businesses generate large amounts of data, which can be overwhelming. ITOA offers valuable insights into internal business functions and processes to help organizations make improvements in areas where they are necessary, including bettering their cybersecurity posture.

With the ability to identify root causes of problems, businesses can better manage risks, identify problems, detect threats, accelerate incident responses, extend the lifespan of their IT assets and generally offer better insights to aid in decision-making.

Key Uses of IT Operations Analytics

It’s clear IT ops analytics offers organizations significant value, along with tangible benefits. Here we’ll take a look at the key uses of ITOA.

Predictive Analytics

A growing trend among businesses is to be proactive and try to get ahead of problems before they come to fruition. This helps avoid IT complications, such as downtime and security vulnerabilities, while reducing the costs associated with the reactive nature of fixing issues. With the powerful predictive analysis capabilities of ITOA, businesses can leverage it to see historical events and identify potential failures before they even happen.

Performance Monitoring

Tracking system health and optimizing resource usage is another key benefit of ITOA. The predictive maintenance abilities help companies anticipate potential failures, empowering them to schedule regular and appropriate maintenance to help prevent issues and minimize downtime. For instance, it can track key performance indicators, such as system availability, network use and response times. If issues are detected, this provides insight into where to make improvements.

Incident & Problem Management

ITOA offers the capacity to detect patterns, see past events and identify root causes of problems to allow faster resolution. Additionally, when an organization gains an understanding of the patterns associated with incident data, this can help them proactively address repeated issues to prevent them from occurring.

Security & Compliance

Nowadays, every large organization wants to optimize their security posture. ITOA can play a vital role in the process by monitoring events while simultaneously analyzing anomalies, glitches or vulnerabilities. This can go a long way in preventing cyber threats, while also assisting an organization in ensuring it consistently adheres to regulatory mandates and industry compliance requirements.

Best Practices for Implementing ITOA

Benjamin Franklin once said, “in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes”. Perhaps in our modern digital-driven society, we can add another certainty. Technology will change, progress and evolve. Artificial intelligence and the predictive nature of tech will play an important role in organizations going forward.

Implementing ITOA will be a part of this for most organizations. When adapting to integrating it into your systems, you’ll want to follow best practices to empower you to leverage AI tools for real-time insights, automate alerts and reporting and integrate with existing ITSM frameworks.

• Define clear objectives with specific and measurable goals
• Develop a data strategy to determine how you want to collect, store and process data within the ITOA platform
• Develop a plan to collect data based on quality and consistency to allow a higher degree of analysis accuracy
• Select the right tools within the ITOA platform to align with your organization’s goals, needs and technical abilities
• Examine your company’s security and compliance requirements to help make certain ITOA use adheres to what your organization needs, including preventing unauthorized access
• Implement ITOA in phases to test the platform and processes to ensure its working as you expect; gradually expand in phases to increase the probability of a successful installation with little to no disruption
• Emphasize automation when in the planning process; ITOA easily helps streamline tasks
• Once the process of ITOA integration has begun, continuously monitor, solicit feedback from stakeholders and adjust for improvements if necessary
• Document all events throughout the process to detect abnormalities, make improvements and ensure things are working properly

Organizational buy-in is another vital factor to consider. Before integrating ITOA, plan to initiate communication with all relevant stakeholders and internal teams. Ask them for their requirements and input before beginning the process to implement ITOA so you can be certain you of addressing their needs.

Overcoming Potential Challenges of Integrating ITOA

Not unlike any other type of change in an organization, businesses can encounter challenges when implementing an ITOA solution into their systems. This is especially true for companies that have historically relied upon manual processes – it can be difficult to “hand over” certain tasks to let high-level technology completely analyze situations.

Potential challenges organizations may face include:

• Not fully understanding their IT environment, including legacy systems and compatibility
• Not planning their ITOA integration with business needs in mind
• Dismissing the business impact of ITOA by not quantifying its value
• Neglecting to formulate a plan for data consolidation when creating a unified IT ops analytics solution
• Overlooking potential areas of data inaccuracy by not validating and maintaining good data quality
• Disregarding a need for qualified expertise when implementing new tech solutions into an organization’s technology landscape, including ITOA

Working with a skilled technology partner can help organizations wade through the complexities and identify the best ways to work with ITOA and integrate it in a way that benefits the company.

Why ITOA May Be Right for Your Organization

Technology continues to progress and evolve at a rapid pace and, while it can be beneficial and cost-effective for making data-driven decisions in IT operations, the complexities of IT systems is something that cannot be avoided or ignored. Modern IT teams must consistently monitor the health of their systems and operations, along with having the capacity to quickly identify potential issues and rectify them.

As cloud computing and other technologies continue to expand and gain more relevance in the enterprise landscape, organizations must be able to juggle and optimize the array of systems they may use. The complexities that accompany the various technology solutions modern businesses utilize need a systematic approach to ensure everything continues to operate smoothly — and without disruption. In this area, ITOA can effortlessly deliver.

ITOA offers a high degree of automation, machine learning capabilities and can transform operational data into real-time insights to help facilitate better decision-making. Since it eliminates potential human error, it also increases accuracy because it relies upon actual past events and can use them to predict potential future issues. This is especially important when it comes to events, such as downtime and other disruptive events that can negatively impact an organization.

In terms of strategic planning, when it comes down to it, ITOA empowers decision-makers to be able to better monitor and analyze data to help them make more informed decisions with current data.

Ready to Explore Integrating ITOA? Red River is Here to Help You!

Integrating new tech involves numerous complexities which can be overwhelming, especially when a company’s decision-makers don’t know their potential options. Artificial intelligence is growing at an exponential rate, and it can be difficult to decide how to best transition to new systems, especially with technology consistently evolving with new products.

Red River steadily invests in being up to date on the latest technologies to assist our clients in deciding on the best products or processes to help them meet their objectives and goals. If you’re considering moving your business to next-level tech, our team of experts can help! We can help you evaluate your current systems and help you integrate ITOA in stages, working with you every step of the way.

To learn more about IT operations analytics, its benefits and what your organization needs to do to integrate it into your current architecture, contact Red River today to schedule a consultation. Let’s get the conversation started! We’re happy to answer questions, address concerns, suggest solutions and provide more information.