MSPs (Managed Service Providers) have a lot of responsibility on their shoulders. They must look after the IT infrastructures of other organizations and ensure that they are up and running all the time. What happens when the IT infrastructure of an MSP itself stops working? Like a business organization, an MSP also faces repercussions due to downtime. Even a minute of downtime can prevent an MSP from offering the necessary services to its clients. To boost service availability and client satisfaction, MSPs look for ways to reduce downtime. According to the recent trends in the industry, MSPs are shifting their focus towards AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) to minimize downtime. Read on to know the role of AIOps in decreasing downtime for MSPs.

Challenges with ensuring high uptime

Ensuring high uptime or a 99.99% uptime is challenging for MSPs. Some challenges that prevent MSPs from boosting their uptime are as follows:

• MSPs cannot predict service issues within their IT infrastructure due to a lack of good monitoring tools. Application performance monitoring and cloud monitoring are a big concern for MSPs in 2022. When MSPs cannot predict service issues, unexpected outages occur and hamper service availability.

• MSPs use traditional monitoring solutions that generate alerts every time an IT incident occurs. However, traditional monitoring tools generate a large number of alerts in a day. MSPs cannot find which alert needs immediate attention due to a large number of monitoring alerts.

• MSPs do not have any technology to perform event correlation. Outdated monitoring solutions cannot find patterns between the IT events. As a result, performance issues cannot be predicted, and MSPs experience unexpected shutdowns.

• MSPs have increased the size and complexity of their IT infrastructure to meet the demands. At present, MSPs have a large IT infrastructure that needs regular attention. MSPs may not have the workforce to manage a large IT infrastructure. As a result, they find it hard to handle the complexity of the IT infrastructure and ensure high uptime.

• For ensuring high uptime, MSPs need high observability of their IT infrastructure and software systems. Poor visibility into the internal states of software systems is preventing MSPs from boosting their uptime.

As you can see, several challenges prevent MSPs from ensuring high service availability. The technology used by MSPs is outdated and cannot handle the complexity of modern-day IT infrastructure. Not to forget, modern-day IT infrastructures are complex and out of human reach when it comes to management. The only viable option is to use reliable automation technology to manage the ever-growing IT infrastructure. It is why AIOps has been a reliable solution for MSPs since its inception. Many MSPs have already reported high uptime and increase in service availability after adopting an AIOps strategy. Let us see how AIOps boost uptime for MSPs in 2022.

Visibility into the IT infrastructure

AIOps is powered via AI/ML algorithms that can perform without any human intervention. To boost observability in the IT infrastructure, you need AIOps. MSPs can collect performance data from all sources within the IT infrastructure with an AIOps-based analytics platform. Be it network data or user data; everything can be collected in one place. An MSP can get a bird’s eye view of the entire IT infrastructure with an AIOps-based analytics platform. When there is ample monitoring data, MSPs can predict outages and service issues. They can then take proactive steps to deal with outages and service issues. With good visibility, MSPs can refine the workflows, adopt a proactive approach and follow MSP best practices. When you know more about the internal state of crucial software systems, you can easily predict service issues and ensure high uptime. Traditional monitoring solutions cannot offer information regarding the internal state of crucial software systems.

Proactive incident management

The key to ensuring high uptime is mitigating incidents proactively. When you mitigate IT incidents before they happen, they cannot hamper service availability. However, the real challenge is to mitigate IT incidents before they happen. Thanks to AIOps, proactive incident management is now a reality. How an AIOps-based analytics platform proactively manages IT incidents is as follows:

The key to ensuring high uptime is mitigating incidents proactively. When you mitigate IT incidents before they happen, they cannot hamper service availability. However, the real challenge is to mitigate IT incidents before they happen. Thanks to AIOps, proactive incident management is now a reality. How an AIOps-based analytics platform proactively manages IT incidents is as follows:

• The first step toward proactive incident management is to ensure round-the-clock monitoring. Be it application performance monitoring or network monitoring, MSPs need to ensure that they always have access to performance data. Traditional monitoring tools won’t help MSPs imbibe a continuous monitoring culture. It can only be done with an AIOps-based analytics platform.

• Since AIOps-led monitoring solutions always collect performance data, it is easy to find unusual patterns. With the help of event correlation, an AIOps-based analytics platform will find out unusual patterns within the IT infrastructure. An unusual pattern can be the ill-performance of a software system or endpoint.

• With the help of unusual patterns, AIOps can forecast performance issues and outages. When MSPs know about performance issues in advance, they can take the necessary steps to prevent them. An AIOps-led monitoring solution is intelligent and uses historical and performance data to predict performance issues. Even if downtime is bound to happen, you can prepare for it in advance.

Incident prioritization for MSPs

Incident prioritization is essential for MSPs to minimize downtime. Not all IT incidents will result in downtime for MSPs. Only a few IT incidents will lead to the entire shutdown of the IT infrastructure. It is crucial that you pay attention to the high-impact incidents first. MSPs that use outdated monitoring solutions struggle with incident prioritization. An AIOps-based analytics platform will also predict the impact of an IT incident.

Traditional monitoring tools flood IT teams with many alerts in a day. MSPs cannot find which incident will have the biggest impact on their service availability. As a result, they end up ignoring crucial IT incidents that can result in downtime.

At present, MSPs must deal with complex and large IT infrastructures that cannot be managed manually. MSPs cannot keep hiring system administrators for manual monitoring of the IT infrastructure. Automation technology is the key for MSPs looking to decrease downtime and boost service availability. Start using AIOps-based solutions to minimize downtime!