The IT landscape is complex and dynamic, with infrastructure and applications constantly changing. To effectively manage this environment, IT teams need help. This is where AIOps comes in. AIOps, or Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, leverages big data, machine learning, and other AI technologies to enhance IT operations and performance.
Key Takeaways:
- AIOps platforms leverage big data, machine learning, and AI to enhance IT operations through intelligent monitoring, analytics, and automation. Major vendors include Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Splunk, and BMC Helix.
- Complementing the platforms are more specialized tools for infrastructure monitoring (SolarWinds, BMC Helix), log analysis (Splunk, Sumo Logic), incident response (PagerDuty, xMatters), and observability data management (Splunk O11y Cloud, Dynatrace).
- Cloud native monitoring is a fast growing use case, with leading solutions from Datadog and AWS CloudWatch offering optimized visibility for dynamic cloud environments.
- Adoption of AIOps capabilities continues to accelerate, as organizations aim to establish data pipelines, automation, and intelligence to enable stability and agility goals around digital transformation and hybrid cloud.
- While initially geared toward large enterprises, AIOps solutions are now available for SMBs from vendors tailored offerings that emphasize simplified deployments and rapid time to value.
In 2024, AIOps has become an essential technology for modern IT shops. The global AIOps platform market is projected to reach $32.6 billion by 2028. With many options now available, we have compiled this list of the top 17 AIOps tools to consider in 2024.
Monitoring and Analytics
AIOps platforms provide intelligent monitoring, analytics, and automation to improve visibility and stability across hybrid cloud environments. Key capabilities include:
- Topology Mapping: Discover relationships between infrastructure components
- Anomaly Detection: Identify faults and performance issues
- Root Cause Analysis: Determine the underlying source of problems
- Capacity Planning: Optimize resource allocation
Here are leading options for AIOps monitoring and analytics:
Dynatrace
Dynatrace offers an AIOps platform that leverages AI and automation to integrate data from across the full cloud ecosystem. Key features include:
- Smartscape: Automatic topology mapping
- Davis AI: Anomaly detection and causation analysis
- Log anomalies: Identify issues in log data
- Capacity planner: Forecast resource requirements
Dynatrace is a top choice for large enterprise AIOps deployments.
AppDynamics
AppDynamics focuses specifically on application performance monitoring with machine learning capabilities. Strengths include:
- Business iQ – ML driven analytics to optimize application performance
- Transaction profiling – Trace issues across distributed architectures
- Database visibility – SQL statement analysis
- Capacity forecasting – Project resource needs
For application centric AIOps, AppDynamics is a leading choice.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
While AIOps platforms take a broad approach, IT infrastructure monitoring (ITIM) tools provide deeper visibility into servers, networks, and other core components. Top options include:
SolarWinds
SolarWinds offers comprehensive hybrid IT monitoring combined with AIOps powered analytics via its Network Performance Monitor and Server & Application Monitor products. Highlights include:
- Network Insights – ML driven analysis of network flow data
- Server Insights – Anomaly detection for server metrics
- PerfStack – GUI workflow to diagnose performance issues
- Orion Maps – Automatic application dependency mapping
For on-premises and hybrid infrastructure, SolarWinds tops the list of AIOps enabled ITIM tools.
BMC Helix
BMC Helix is both an AIOps platform and ITIM solution. For infrastructure monitoring it provides:
- Discovery – Agentless topology mapping
- Service Modeling – Define relationships between components
- Analytics – Predictive algorithms to optimize performance
- Alarm Analytics – Analyze alerts and suggest remediation
With broad AIOps capabilities tailored for infrastructure, BMC Helix is a compelling one stop shop.
| IT Infrastructure Monitoring | Key Capabilities |
|---|---|
| SolarWinds | Network Insights, Server Insights, PerfStack, Orion Maps |
| BMC Helix | Discovery, Service Modeling, Analytics, Alarm Analytics |
Log Management and Analysis
Machine data such as application logs and network logs provide valuable insights into IT environments. AIOps powered log management and analysis tools include:
Splunk
The de facto standard in the log management market, Splunk uses ML and analytics to extract value from machine data. Core capabilities:
- Logs – Collect, index, search log data
- Metrics – Gather performance and business metrics
- Traces – Monitor distributed transaction workflows
With a rich ecosystem of apps and integrations, Splunk leads the log management category.
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic is a cloud native log analysis platform focused on security and operations use cases:
- Analytics – Customizable dashboards and reports
- Security insights – Threat intelligence and anomaly detection
- Kubernetes observability – Monitor container workloads
As a born-in-the-cloud solution, Sumo Logic simplifies cloud migration and hybrid deployments.
Incident Management
AIOps platforms integrate with incident management systems to enable smarter remediation. Below are top options:
PagerDuty
The leader in digital operations management, PagerDuty focuses on orchestrating teams to resolve infrastructure incidents and outages.
- Intelligent Triage – Automate event categorization with ML
- Diagnostics – Integrate log and metric data to accelerate root cause analysis
- Incident Intelligence – Apply historical insights to incident response
PagerDuty sets the standard for real time operations orchestration.
xMatters
xMatters takes a communications driven approach to incident resolution and IT alerting. Key features include:
- Event Manager – Machine learning triage and workflow automation
- Communications workflows – Flexible modalities including voice, SMS, chat bots, and email
For critical communication processes, xMatters leads the pack.
Observability Data Platforms
Observability data platforms (ODPs) provide infrastructure to store, manage, and analyze machine data at scale. Top options include:
Splunk Observability Cloud
Expanding beyond its log management roots, Splunk Observability Cloud delivers full-stack observability data infrastructure. Capabilities include:
- Metrics – Infrastructure and custom metrics collection
- Traces – Distributed tracing and visualization
- Logs – Log management with analytics
- Workflow integrations – Data onboarding, processing, notifications
For a unified observability data lake, Splunk Observability Cloud is a top choice.
Dynatrace
While focused primarily on monitoring and AIOps, Dynatrace offers an observability data platform and log analytics to complement its core capabilities:
- Log collection – Gather logs and associate with topology
- Causation analysis – Combine logs and metrics for smarter alerting
- OpenTelemetry – Support emerging standards for distributed tracing
Dynatrace provides rich observability infrastructure purpose built for AIOps.
Cloud Monitoring
Monitoring dynamic public cloud environments requires optimized approaches. Top AIOps enabled cloud monitoring tools include:
Datadog
The leader in cloud monitoring, Datadog offers comprehensive visibility across hybrid and multi cloud environments. Key features:
- Infrastructure monitoring – Prebuilt and custom dashboards
- Log management – Collect, search, alert on log data
- APM – Trace requests across distributed architectures
- Synthetics – Scripted browser tests to simulate user journeys
- Cloud security – Identify anomalies and threats
For cloud native digital operations, Datadog is the go-to solution.
AWS CloudWatch
The native monitoring and observability service for AWS, CloudWatch provides out of the box visibility for AWS resources. Highlights include:
- Metrics – Gather OS and application metrics
- Logs – Centralized logging with analysis
- Traces – Monitor application requests
- Alarms and events – Automated event processing
- Dashboards – Customizable data visualization
For optimized AWS monitoring, CloudWatch is an ideal choice.
Conclusion
With the exponential growth in data and complexity, AIOps has become essential to running modern digital environments. Leading platforms from vendors such as Dynatrace, Splunk, and Datadog leverage big data, advanced analytics, and ML to help IT teams gain control.
Complementing the platforms are more specialized tools for infrastructure monitoring, log management, cloud visibility, and incident response. Solutions must also provide flexible data collection, open APIs, and workflow integrations to enable robust observability pipelines.
As hybrid cloud and digital transformation accelerate, AIOps will continue to evolve alongside developments in analytics, automation, and new infrastructure monitoring capabilities. This guide provides a starting point to evaluate options and build an intelligent data driven operations strategy.
FAQs
What are the main components of an AIOps platform?
The core components of an AIOps platform include real time monitoring and topology visualization, anomaly detection, predictive analytics and capacity planning, automated root cause analysis, intelligent alerting, and workflow integrations.
What benefits does AIOps provide?
AIOps improves uptime and performance by applying machine learning and analytics to spot anomalies, forecast problems, streamline troubleshooting, and guide remediation. This enhances visibility while reducing noise and manual effort for IT teams.
Is AIOps required for digital transformation initiatives?
While not mandated, AIOps establishes data pipelines, automation, and intelligence that enable organizations to move faster while maintaining stability. This aligns closely with digital transformation goals around agility and continuous improvement powered by data.
What IT domains can benefit from AIOps?
Common AIOps use cases include cloud monitoring, application performance management, IT infrastructure management, log analytics, site reliability engineering, and security operations. AIOps delivers value across hybrid technology environments.
Is AIOps only for large enterprises?
While adoption is high among Global 2000 companies, AIOps solutions for small to medium sized businesses are readily available from vendors offering tailored capabilities that emphasize ease of use and faster time to value.
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