AIOps Comes of Age in Gartner’s Market Guide for AIOps Platforms

Last month, Gartner published its 2019 version of its Market Guide for AIOps Platforms^*. In case you’re unfamiliar, Gartner Market Guides provide some of the same coverage as Gartner’s well-known Magic Quadrant, but without the per-vendor details and comparison. We believe this year’s Market Guide covers some of the same ground as last year’s guide, but with some significant changes as well, representing the increasing maturation of the AIOps market.

Kentik views AIOps as a set of three primary capabilities:

• Scalable data collection and correlation from a wide variety of sources
• Real-time and historical analytics with problem detection based on machine learning
• Suggestions and workflows with an option to initiate an action or next step

All of these capabilities are centered around a key goal of using big data and machine learning technology to increase the efficiency of IT operations teams. AIOps acts as a force multiplier, allowing teams to spend less time firefighting and more time building new technology capabilities for the organization. We believe Gartner suggests that the ever-increasing volume, velocity and variety of IT operations data will require many more organizations to adopt AIOps technology to maintain the status quo of running reliable IT infrastructure. We also feel that the guide predicts that 40% of IT teams will augment traditional monitoring systems with AIOps capabilities over the next few years.

Kentik believes that this year’s guide makes a new distinction between domain-agnostic and domain-centric AIOps platforms. Domain-agnostic platforms are general purpose products that cover the whole of IT operations, and typically ingest pre-processed data and alerts from other monitoring systems that collect the raw IT operations data. One goal of these systems is to provide a single representation of an event or incident that may be reported by multiple traditional monitoring systems.

Domain-centric AIOps platforms cover a subset of the IT operations landscape. Typical focus areas of domain-centric platforms include application performance monitoring (APM), network performance monitoring (NPM), and endpoint monitoring. Domain-centric platforms provide all of the core AIOps capabilities discussed above, but focus on a more specific set of use cases.

Kentik’s opinion is that organizations should focus initial AIOps efforts on specific use cases. According to Gartner, “Increase the odds of a successful AIOps platform deployment by focusing on a specific use case and adopting an incremental approach that starts with replacing rule-based event analytics and expands into domain-centric workflows like application and network diagnostics.” This makes sense because a narrower scope reduces deployment complexity and makes it easier to see near-term ROI from adopting AIOps technology.

We believe Gartner’s guide also references the four stages of IT operations monitoring (ITOM), which is essentially a progression of value as AIOps and monitoring in general becomes more operationalized within organizations. The phases include:

• Descriptive IT: Visualization and statistical analysis
• Anomaly Detection and Diagnostics: Correlation and automated pattern discovery
• Proactive Operations: Pattern-based prediction
• Avoiding High-Severity Outages: Using analytics to uncover root causes

Here at Kentik, we provide a domain-centric AIOps platform built from the ground up for network professionals. By collecting and correlating large volumes of network data like NetFlow, SNMP, streaming telemetry and BGP routing data, we provide the deep insight and fast data access that network teams need to stay on top of managing today’s infrastructure — whether that be traditional data centers, public cloud, and everywhere in between.

Update March 13, 2020: Kentik no longer distributes Gartner’s Market Guide for AIOps, but you can get the new 2020 Gartner Market Guide for the Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) Market Guide here, courtesy of Kentik. If you’d like to check out what Kentik can do for your network, get in touch or start a trial.

^*Gartner, Inc., Market Guide for AIOps Platforms, by analysts Charley Rich, Pankaj Prasad, Sanjit Ganguli, 7 November 2019

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