“The hybrid estate is expanding so we’re expanding our monitoring capabilities”

JAXenter: OpsRamp announced its Summer 2021 platform release today. The highlight appears to be advanced predictive alerting capabilities. What does this mean and why is it important to your customers?

Michael Fisher: Alerts let you know when you have a problem or potential problem with your IT infrastructure and services. Our new predictive alerting capabilities put some intelligence behind those alerts by anticipating which alerts repeat regularly and turn into performance-impacting incidents and which are mostly noise.

We can identify seasonal alert patterns and reduce service degradations by anticipating when alerts will increase. And we can lower incident volumes by forecasting repetitive alerts, freeing up your ITOps teams for more strategic tasks.

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JAXenter: Digging deeper into your new release, it looks like OpsRamp has expanded its monitoring capabilities to include Auto Monitoring, Alibaba Cloud Monitoring and Datacenter Monitoring. What’s happening with IT Ops pros today that prompted you to increase your focus in these areas?

Michael Fisher: The hybrid estate is expanding so we’re expanding our monitoring capabilities. Alibaba Cloud may not be that popular in North America but it’s the No. 1 public cloud platform (by market share) in Asia and that’s a $300bn Internet economy by 2025. So if we want to support global customers and global business operations–and we do–we needed to add support for that.

But not everything’s moving to the public cloud. Data center technologies continue to advance and enable data center operators to deliver cloud capabilities. So we’ve expanded support for data center infrastructure like storage, networking and hyperconverged infrastructure from vendors like Hitachi, VMware, Dell-EMC and Poly.

JAXenter: A final question. What advice do you have for IT Ops pros who want to move from being reactive in terms of tracking and resolving incidents to proactive as far as preventing them from happening in the first place? Can you give us/them 2-3 best practices?

Michael Fisher: We advocate taking a service-centric approach across the entire incident lifecycle. That starts with hybrid monitoring–one tool to monitor all of your application infrastructure wherever it resides, on-prem and multi-cloud–with service mapping of business services to that underlying hybrid infrastructure.

From there add intelligent event correlation with machine learning, so you’re not drowning in alerts but instead can identify when the same event has kicked off multiple alerts. You have to be able to route those alerts to the right people who can respond to them. And not all of those alerts require human intervention.

You should be able to kick off automated IT processes that can resolve incidents without human intervention, such as automatically patching a vulnerability on the compute instance or invoking an incident remediation policy.

Bi-directional integration with your ITSM tool is another best practice, so you can create, update and close incidents in your ITSM tool as the incidents unfurl and gain better context for dealing with future incidents.