VMware has been at the forefront of everything good in the modern IT infrastructure landscape for a very long time. After it came up with solutions like VMware Server and Workstation around the early 2000s, its reputation got tremendously enhanced amongst businesses looking to upgrade IT infrastructure. VMware has been able to expand its offering since then by moving to public and private cloud. It has also brought sophisticated automation and management tools to simplify IT processes within organizations.

The technology world is not static, it is consistently changing to provide better IT solutions that are in line with the growing and diverse demands of organizations across the world. The newest wave doing the rounds revolves around IT operations and providing support to business services that are dependent on those IT environments. AIOps platforms find their origin, primarily from the world that VMware has created – a world that is built on IT infrastructure that is capable of modifying itself according to needs and is defined by software. This world created by VMware consist of components that are changing and moving at a rapid pace. In order to keep up with these changes, newer approaches to operating environments are required. AIOps solutions are emerging as the ideal way to run IT operations with no reliance on static service models or fragile systems. AIOps framework promises optimal utilizations of skills and effort targeted at delivering maximum value.

In order to make the most of AIOps tools, it is important that they be used in ways that can complement the existing VMware infrastructure strategy. Here are a few of those:

Software-defined is the way to go

Even though SDx is not properly distributed, it is still here and making its mark. However, uneven distribution of SDx is a problem. There is still a need to manage physical network infrastructure along with some aspects of VMware SDN. In order to ensure that you get the most out of VMware NFV/SDN, it is important to conduct a thorough overview combining all these aspects. By investing in an AIOps solution, you will have a unified view of the different infrastructure types. This will help you in not only identifying problems faster but also aligning IT operation resources to deal with them so that they don’t interfere with the service that you provide to your users, which is the ultimate objective of choosing to invest in any IT solution.

Integrated service-related view across infrastructure

Not too many IT organizations out there can afford to use only one technology across the board. Every organization has to deal with many things that they have done prior to switching to AIOps. IT-related decisions made in the past could have a strong bearing on how easy or difficult the transition is. There is not just the management of virtual network and compute amongst others, organizations have their work cut-out with the management of the physical aspects of these things as well. If that’s not enough, there is public cloud and applications to manage as well.

Having an overview of the performance and availability of services that are dependent on all these different types of infrastructure is very important. Having said that, this unified view should be independent of time-consuming manual work associated with entering service definitions at every point of change. Also, whenever it is updated, it should do so with respect to the speed of infrastructure. Whether or not your IT infrastructure can support software-defined frameworks depends a lot on its minimum or no reliance on static models.  AIOps can get isolated data sources into a unified overview of services allowing IT operations teams to make the most of their time and focus only on the important things.

Automation is the key

You have to detect issue early if you want to reduce incident duration – that’s a fact. But there is no point of detecting issues early if you are not able to resolve them faster. AIOps tools connect with third-party automation tools as well as those that come with VMware to provide operators a variety of authorised actions to diagnose and resolve issues. So there are no different automation tools and actions for different people, which enables everyone to make the most of only the best tools. What this leads to is helping the IT operations teams to deliver desired outcomes, such as faster service restoration.

No-risk virtual desktops

There is no denying the benefits of having virtual desktops. However, there are disadvantages of taking the virtual route as well. With virtual desktops, you can have a chain of failure points, out of which any can have a huge impact on the service delivered to end users. The risk comes from the different VDI chain links that are owned by different teams. This could prove harmful and cause outage, especially if support teams don’t go beyond their area of specialisation and don’t communicate with other support teams either. The outages will be there for a longer period of time in these cases. AIOps can detect developing issues early and provide a background of the entire problem throughout the VDI chain. This can help different support teams to collaborate with each other and provide a resolution faster, consequently saving end users from any disruption.

Collaboration across service teams