In a recent market guide, Gartner divided AIOps into two significant categories: domain-centric and domain-agnostic. Companies that wish to use either of the tools will have to recognize the purpose of these tools and how they can impact the existing processes.

Domain-Centric and Domain-Agnostic

In recent times, many companies have been shifting towards IT Automation with AI. The main reason for this shift is that with AIOps tools, it is easier to optimize the IT infrastructure and minimize risks. Using machine learning, AIOps solutions ensure that all workflows are automated and have less downtime. It also allows operations teams to focus on other essential tasks instead of just routine work.

Companies that want to adopt automation in the IT sector can choose between three types of AIOps tools:

1. Domain-centric AIOps solutions
2. Domain-agnostic AIOps solutions
3. Inhouse AIOps solutions

Most of the time, companies prefer to choose between domain-centric or domain-agnostic tools since do-it-yourself AIOps tools can be a little challenging to manage due to a lack of hands-on training and adequate knowledge.

Domain-centric AIOps tools, as is understood by the term, are focused on a specific domain. These AIOps solutions are usually applicable to a company’s particular endpoint systems or even one distinct network. Therefore, the range of work that can be done using any domain-centric AIOps tool is limited. For enterprises, use-cases when it comes to domain-centric AIOps tools are low. But they can be used when a company wants to work on any particular domain and benefit the most from it. There are specific data sources that domain-centric AIOps solutions can access. The sources that these tools can work with depends on the type of data that is provided. Suppose a company wants to implement AIOps solutions across the IT environment. In that case, using just domain-centric AIOps tools will not be sufficient.

Domain-agnostic AIOps tools, on the other hand, can access data from various sources. It can be any data from any period in the history of the company. Therefore, domain-agnostic AIOps is highly flexible and can be applied across several platforms in the IT environment. Companies produce and receive a large volume of data every day. Domain-agnostic AIOps solutions can access and process the entire volume of data. These tools can successfully optimize a company’s IT infrastructure and bring tremendous value to an enterprise. Usually, when companies have to deal with any volume of data, several monitoring tools can help integrate that data. Domain-agnostic AIOps solutions use these monitoring tools to access the data and modify or deal with many different issues. So, companies that wish to make changes to the enterprise can invest in domain-agnostic AIOps solutions, which are designed for general-purpose platforms and not specific.

While many technology firms offer AIOps platforms, some companies may prefer to build their own. There are open-source tools that companies can use for do-it-yourself AIOps solutions. Plug-and-play tools are available for engineers to build an AIOps platform. However, this task is highly complex and requires the right skill to create a functional AIOps platform. It is quite a difficult task, and those who opt for it usually require services different from what domain-centric or domain-agnostic AIOps solutions offer. Therefore, companies need to figure out if they can benefit from domain-centric or domain-agnostic AIOps solutions.

Domain-Centric vs. Domain-Agnostic: Which one should you choose?

IT professionals need to understand how their systems could benefit from AIOps and then choose a particular type of AIOps solution. The best AIOps platforms software applications offer domain-centric and domain-agnostic tools for enterprises.

Companies should choose domain-centric AIOps tools if they want to focus on optimizing a particular network or system. Domain-centric AIOps tools are often applied to measure the latency in applications. Usually, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools check how well the systems are performing. But while calculating the latency, there might be some errors. These errors are often overlooked during manual checks. So, this is where domain-centric AIOps solutions are applicable. If the AIOps tools recognize continued latency significantly higher than before, the application will immediately alert. For such purposes, where only a specific domain requires the services provided by AIOps, one can opt for domain-centric AIOps.

Apart from applying AIOps tools to a specific system or network, companies will require domain-agnostic tools. There are many benefits of using domain-agnostic AIOps solutions, such as:

• Domain-agnostic AIOps solutions access data from various databases, computations, and services. Using these tools increase visibility and improve observability.
• Different alerts in a system can create too much noise. These noises will drown the critical alerts. However, domain-agnostic AIOps solutions provide specific alerts after prioritizing each issue.
• If the IT infrastructure is not optimized, the risk of anomalies can be extremely high. At times, this may lead to outages. To prevent these outages from happening, operations teams can use domain-agnostic AIOps tools to predict anomalies. AIOps can predict these anomalies before they happen and thus, eliminate the chance of an outage.

Conclusion

Several sectors use both domain-centric and domain-agnostic AIOps solutions. For example, in the healthcare industry, systems can benefit from both. Suppose AI is used in diagnostic devices, then with the help of domain-centric AIOps. In that case, the device can use the data obtained to predict outcomes. If a patient is exhibiting different symptoms, domain-agnostic AIOps tools can use the data to correlate the symptoms and identify a cause.

Enterprises are using AIOps based digital transformation solutions to change how business operates and increase the value of all provided services. The use of AIOps tools is expanding, and companies are starting to understand which type of solutions will be beneficial. While domain-centric AIOps is limited and domain-agnostic tools are more flexible, each has a purpose and is extremely useful to drive digital transformation.