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Tag: Moogsoft

  • Moogsoft Publishes “Observability with AIOps For Dummies”

    New eBook provides DevOps and SRE teams best practices to achieve operational visibility with AIOps

    SAN FRANCISCO – July 8, 2020 – Moogsoft, a pioneer and leading provider of artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), today announced the release of “Observability with AIOps For Dummies,” an educational best-practices guide for DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams to successfully automate observability of complex IT systems and build continuous assurance into their digital services with AIOps. Additionally, the book provides actionable insights for using AIOps for better agility and responsiveness at scale. The eBook is available for immediate download at www.moogsoft.com/dummies.

    DevOps and SRE teams are constantly in fire-fighting mode as they overcome barriers put in place by complex toolchains, data and infrastructure. AIOps allows them to proactively detect and resolve issues within those systems. It streamlines incident resolution so teams can meet service level agreements and objectives, manage error budgets and accelerate digital transformation initiatives. By leveraging AIOps to automate observability, teams can develop more, operate less and ultimately deliver the agility needed to innovate customer experience.

    “In a growing digital economy, downtime simply isn’t an option for DevOps and SRE teams as they balance constant delivery of new services with maintenance of increasingly complex infrastructure,” said Adam Frank, author of “Observability with AIOps For Dummies” and VP, Product & Design at Moogsoft. “This book will guide these teams to unlock their true potential to innovate by automating observability using AIOps.”

    “Observability with AIOps For Dummies” includes:

    • A practical explanation of what artificial intelligence (AI) actually does.

    • Educational introductions to machine learning and neural network techniques.

    • An overview of how AIOps helps DevOps and SRE teams.

    • Best practices and real-world use cases describing how AIOps streamlines the monitoring of operational data from applications, cloud services, networks, and infrastructure.

    • Real-world case studies from Moogsoft customers using AIOps across DevOps and SRE teams.

    • Practical advice for an organization to easily and quickly apply AIOps for drastically improved digital experiences.

    “It’s our mission at Moogsoft to be an educational source not only for our customers but the AIOps community at large,” said Phil Tee, Founder and CEO of Moogsoft. “This book is our latest initiative to teach the practical essentials needed by anyone looking to implement an AIOps strategy into their business operations. The book’s content comes straight from our experience pioneering the market, helping customers and innovating our product accordingly. With the inclusion of real-world success stories from Moogsoft customers, readers have an inside look at the value AIOps brings to DevOps and SRE teams.”

    AIOps and Observability

    “Observability with AIOps For Dummies” complements the recent launch of Moogsoft Express, Moogsoft’s integrated, cloud-native AIOps and observability solution. Available now, Moogsoft Express is a scalable, flexible, easy-to-use AIOps and observability offering that gives teams the ability to spend more time developing the digital services that transform and accelerate the business — and less time operating them. Teams interested in trying Moogsoft Express can learn more in “Observability with AIOps For Dummies.”

    Additional Resources

    About Moogsoft

    Moogsoft is a pioneer and leading provider of AIOps solutions that help IT teams work faster and smarter. With patented AI analyzing billions of events daily across the world’s most complex IT environments, the Moogsoft AIOps Platform helps the world’s top enterprises avoid outages, automate service assurance, and accelerate digital transformation initiatives. Founded in 2012, Moogsoft has more than 140 customers worldwide including American Airlines, Fannie Mae, Fiserv, HCL Technologies, SAP SuccessFactors, and Verizon Media. It has established strategic partnerships with leading managed service providers and outsourcing organizations including AWS, Cisco, HCL Technologies, TCS and Wipro.

    Moogsoft® and the Moogsoft logo are proprietary trademarks of Moogsoft Inc. All other products or names may be trademarks of their respective companies.

    For more information about Moogsoft’s AIOps platform and its customers’ success, visit www.moogsoft.com.

  • World Wide Technology Partners with Moogsoft to Extend AIOps Practice and Deliver Customers the Virtual NOC

    Moogsoft AIOps Platform expands WWT’s AIOps offering to automate incident management and help remote IT Ops prevent outages, now available to trial within Advanced Technology Center (ATC)

    SAN FRANCISCO – May 27, 2020 – Moogsoft, the pioneer and leading provider of artificial intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) and World Wide Technology (WWT), a global technology solution provider, today announced they have partnered to deliver clients a joint solution that allows IT operations and DevOps teams to generate increased business value and more effectively ensure digital service uptime from anywhere.

    This collaboration enables WWT’s market-leading AIOps practice to deliver enterprises virtualized Network Operations Centers (NOC) for increased productivity, reduced costs and accelerated innovation across their digital services. Under the partnership, WWT will leverage the Moogsoft AIOps Platform with clients to ingest data from multiple sources—including metrics, alerts, traces & logs—as well as patented Moogsoft algorithms and collaboration tools to proactively understand incidents and their root cause, prevent outages and minimize downtime.

    “The current crisis and business climate are driving a sudden shift in how enterprises rely on their digital channels to maintain connections with customers, and build new ones,” said Brian Ortbals, VP Global Engineering Team, World Wide Technology. “Moogsoft AIOps serves as the architectural cornerstone of our expanded AIOps practice, and will help our clients protect revenue-generating customer experiences through better early outage detection and prevention, and increased business awareness.”

    The world is rapidly moving to a digital-first business model, increasing the pressure on newly remote IT operations teams to ensure digital properties perform well.

    AIOps brings artificial intelligence and machine learning to IT operations and DevOps, giving teams a single-pane-of-glass to find and fix IT incidents before they become revenue-impacting outages.

    “World Wide Technology has built an impressive AIOps practice to help global enterprises transform their revenue-generating operations from traditional bank branches or retail stores into a collection of digital services,” said Moogsoft Founder and CEO Phil Tee. “The addition of the Moogsoft AIOps Platform helps boost the productivity of IT Operations, and lowers the total cost to deliver exceptional experiences across the business.”

    Moogsoft AIOps Live in the ATC

    WWT customers can also now experience the virtual NOC for themselves in a new Moogsoft environment at WWT’s Advanced Technology Center (ATC). Moogsoft’s ATC Lab lets clients test drive the platform, and experience its comprehensive set of advanced algorithmic functions which automate and streamline key IT operations monitoring processes, including ingestion of data of all types and from all sources; noise reduction; alert correlation; root cause identification; and resolution automation.

    Moogsoft Enterprise 8.0 Enables the Virtual NOC

    Built on the Moogsoft AIOps Platform, Moogsoft Enterprise 8.0 delivers unprecedented automation and user experience, allowing IT Ops and DevOps teams to virtualize their NOC and work more effectively — from anywhere. The Moogsoft Situation Room expands collaboration capabilities throughout the incident management process, so these teams can diagnose and resolve problems quickly, before they impact user experience. More details at moogsoft.com/VNOC.

    Additional Resources

    About Moogsoft

    Moogsoft is a pioneer and leading provider of AIOps solutions that help IT teams work faster and smarter. With patented AI analyzing billions of events daily across the world’s most complex IT environments, the Moogsoft AIOps Platform helps the world’s top enterprises avoid outages, automate service assurance, and accelerate digital transformation initiatives. Founded in 2012, Moogsoft has more than 140 customers worldwide including American Airlines, Fannie Mae, Fiserv, HCL Technologies, SAP SuccessFactors, and Verizon Media. It has established strategic partnerships with leading managed service providers and outsourcing organizations including AWS, Cisco, HCL Technologies, TCS and Wipro.

    Moogsoft® and the Moogsoft logo are proprietary trademarks of Moogsoft Inc. All other products or names may be trademarks of their respective companies.

    For more information about Moogsoft’s AIOps platform and its customers’ success, visit www.moogsoft.com.

    About World Wide Technology

    World Wide Technology (WWT) is a global technology solution provider with more than $12 billion in annual revenue that provides digital strategy, innovative technology and supply chain solutions to large public and private organizations around the globe. While most companies talk about delivering business and technology outcomes, WWT does it. Based in St. Louis, WWT employs more than 6,000 people and operates approximately 4 million square feet of warehousing and integration space in more than 20 facilities throughout the world.

     

  • Moogsoft Advances AIOps Workflow

    Moogsoft Advances AIOps Workflow

    Moogsoft is moving to make it easier to create custom workflows around its AIOps platform while expanding the number of integrations provided to include connectors to New Relic Insights, Microsoft Teams and proxy support for polling integrations with IT platforms Zenoss, Zabbix, vCenter, vSphere, Solarwinds, Spectrum and SevOne.

    Gabe Coelho-Kostolny, senior product management and product marketing leader at Moogsoft, said a Workflow Engine that has been added to version 7.2 of the Moogsoft AIOps platform makes it possible to trigger actions such as notifications, ticket creation and other automated tasks within Moogsoft and external systems. Those actions can be employed within incident management workflows ad other automated remediation tools, he said.

    Moogsoft has also added tools that make it possible to visualize alert clustering algorithms in real time and, if needed, fine-tune them. That capability is intended to provide IT operations teams with more confidence in the recommendations being generated by the AIOps platform, Coelho-Kostolny said.

    Finally, Moogsoft is making available an analytics dashboard dubbed Individual Statistics, which enables managers to drill down from the team level to better understand the workload and key performance indicators of each team member.

    Coelho-Kostolny noted there is already a high correlation between organizations that have adopted best DevOps practices and those moving to implement AIOps. The complexity of many DevOps environments is in many cases forcing the AIOps issue because all the alerts being generated creates a level of fatigue among human IT administrators that results in them not being able to keep pace with the overall rate of change, he said. The concern now is no longer so much whether human IT administrators will be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI) as much as it is enabling IT teams to stay on top of all the tasks required. The opportunity now, he said, is to make it easier for organizations that have embraced DevOps to also customize the AIOps platform.

    Of course, AIOps platforms presuppose that IT organizations have access to massive amounts of accurate data about the IT environment. Collecting that data often winds up being a bigger challenge than most organizations appreciate. In general, Coelho-Kostolny said it’s clear AIOps platform adoption is reaching a tipping point in the enterprise. Organizations, however, need to be careful distinguishing between what is truly artificial intelligence and what may be simply a rules-based engine that has been added to an existing IT service management (ITSM) platform, Coelho-Kostolny said.

    Regardless of the AI path chosen, the ongoing shortage of IT expertise with critical skills means organizations will continue to experiment with AI. The real issue is determining to what degree of confidence IT teams will have in those AI platforms. After all, if the assumptions an AI system is relying on to make a recommendation prove faulty, the potential for harm tends to be a lot greater than any mistake a single human IT administrator might ever make on their own.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Moogsoft AIOps 7.2 Optimizes Ease of IT Operations with New Transparency, Efficiency & Customization Enhancements

    AIOps Platform Pioneer and Leader Transforms Service Assurance with Workflow Engine, other New Features

     

    SAN FRANCISCO – May 29, 2019 – Moogsoft, a pioneer and leading provider of artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), announced today the release of Moogsoft AIOps 7.2, the latest version of its enterprise platform. Release 7.2 features groundbreaking new capabilities that ease the burden of IT Operations and DevOps teams by optimizing service assurance. Significant new transparency, efficiency, and customization enhancements include: a new workflow engine, AI visualizations, performance dashboards, and new tool integrations.

    “Operations teams seek ways to tame the complexity of their IT environments and make sense of frequent alert storms,” said Nancy Gohring, senior analyst for application and infrastructure performance at 451 Research. “Applying sophisticated analytics, including machine learning, is useful for improving the correlation of alerts and delivering better visibility. Automation enabled by this visibility will have a positive effect on incident response time and increase overall ops team productivity.”

    David Bell, Managing Director of Cybersecurity & Technology Risk Management at American Airlines, says, “With the AIOps system, we have cut the average time it takes to resolve technical snafus by 50 percent. The Moogsoft platform, used at the company’s 24/7 IT Global Situation Center, analyzes 5 million IT error notices and warnings a month, or about 2 every second, as it scans for IT hiccups that could disable a luggage-scanning system, delay a flight, or trip up some other core function.” (source: Wall Street Journal, 14 May 2019)

    New Moogsoft AIOps 7.2 Features

    New Workflow Engine Manages Workloads, Automates Ticketing & Notifications

    Moogsoft AIOps 7.2’s new Workflow Engine provides IT Ops teams the ability to visually create sophisticated custom workflows using a simple but powerful user interface. A rich set of workflow options can trigger actions both within Moogsoft and to external systems for actions such as notifications, ticket creation, and other automated tasks. The Workflow Engine simplifies conditional event processing with enrichment of event alert data, enabling automation of incident management workflows as well as integration with automated remediation tools.

    Situation Visualization Increases Transparency, Understanding of How Algorithms Work

    Situation Visualization provides powerful new visual tools for understanding the operation of Moogsoft’s alert clustering algorithms and, if needed, for fine-tuning them. Similarity clusters are presented as radar charts for each Situation. They provide a window into how the system’s automated decision making works. Users can understand at a glance the matching criteria for those events that have been correlated together into a single Situation. Together with Probable Root Cause, Topology, and other visualizations, Moogsoft’s Situation Room offers real-time situational awareness to IT Ops and DevOps teams. 

    Customization Features Conform to Customers’ Unique Organizational Needs

    Moogsoft AIOps 7.2 introduces a number of new features that personalize and configure the platform for a customer’s unique environment and organizational requirements. These comprise:

    • Situation Room Headers. The information presented in Situation Room headers can be easily customized to improve operational efficiency. Team members can understand the Situation at a glance and decide on next steps.
    • Individual Statistics. A new analytics dashboard called Individual Statistics allows managers to drill down from the team level to better understand the workload and key performance indicators of each individual team member. This insight allows team leaders and all members to optimize work distributions and overall operational effectiveness.
    • New Tool Integrations. Moogsoft AIOps platform continues to expand its broad suite of out-of-the-box integrations for faster time to value. New integrations include connectors to New Relic Insights, Microsoft Teams, and proxy support for all polling integrations (e.g. Zenoss, Zabbix, vCenter, vSphere, Solarwinds, Spectrum, and SevOne).

    “AIOps is gaining momentum streamlining IT Operations as well as DevOps,” explains Phil Tee, Chairman and CEO of Moogsoft. “We’ve built the AIOps market from the beginning, pioneered the way with over 50 patents, and now help over 120 of the largest corporations transform their IT service assurance. Today we’re delivering the next-generation platform to democratize the use of AIOps at all organizations. Our goal is to make Moogsoft the solution of choice for all enterprises – large and small – for agile, proactive event resolution. To this end, release 7.2 empowers enterprises to avoid outages, meet service level agreements, and accelerate digital transformation.”

    For more information about Moogsoft’s AIOps 7.2, visit Moogsoft.com, read our Blog or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

    About Moogsoft

    Moogsoft is a pioneer and leading provider of AIOps solutions that help IT teams work faster and smarter. With patented AI analyzing billions of events daily across the world’s most complex IT environments, the Moogsoft AIOps platform helps the world’s top enterprises avoid outages, automate service assurance, and accelerate digital transformation initiatives. Founded in 2011, Moogsoft has more than 120 customers worldwide including SAP SuccessFactors, American Airlines, Fannie Mae, Yahoo!, and HCL Technologies. It has established strategic partnerships with leading managed service providers and outsourcing organizations including AWS, Cisco, HCL Technologies, TCS and Wipro.

     

    Moogsoft® and the Moogsoft logo are proprietary trademarks of Moogsoft Inc. All other products or names may be trademarks of their respective companies.

     

  • Leading Brands Turn to Moogsoft AIOps to Build Continuous Service Assurance into Their Digital Transformation Initiatives

    Pioneer of AIOps doubles customer base by more than 2X year-over-year

    SAN FRANCISCO – February 27, 2019 – Moogsoft, a pioneer and leading provider of artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), announced today that it had completed its fiscal year ending January 31, 2019 with significant milestones – doubling its customer base year-over-year to more than 120 total customers, including 20 of the Fortune 1000. The company expanded its AIOps platform with new innovations to deliver continuous service assurance to its customers as they accelerate their digital transformation. Marquee customers include American Airlines, Charles Schwab, DirecTV, Dimension Data, Fannie Mae, First Data, KeyBank, McAfee, Navy Federal Credit Union and Qualcomm.

    “KeyBank selected Moogsoft based on its proven ability to significantly impact a number of objectives,” said Mick Miller, Senior DevOps Architect, Continuous Delivery and Feedback at Key Bank. “We want to reduce mean time to customer resolution, support our journey to reduce alert fatigue by reducing event noise down to only actionable alerts, and use Moogsoft’s best in class Machine Learning and AIOps approach to IT Operations. Going forward, KeyBank aims to detect critical events faster and improve team collaboration and workflow – thanks to Moogsoft’s focus on quality service assurance.”

    Moogsoft highlights over the past year include:

    • Strong Year-Over-Year Growth: Total bookings increased 60 percent year-over-year, with annual recurring revenue (ARR) also growing by 60 percent during the period. Moogsoft’s average contract value (ACV) is approaching $0.5M.
    • Accelerated Global Customer Growth: Moogsoft grew its global customer base by more than 2X over the past fiscal year. Customers include global leaders in a diverse range of industries. Some recent customers leveraging Moogsoft AIOps platform include: Bharti Enterprises, Deloitte, Johnson & Johnson, Loblaws, Merck & Co., Navy Federal Credit Union, NTT, Quest Diagnostics, Uber, and Under Armor.
    • Deepened AIOps Capabilities: Moogsoft announced version 7.0 of the Moogsoft AIOps platform introducing Vertex Entropy and Situation Topology Visualization — two innovative AI-based technologies that help IT teams understand the root cause of any problem impacting customers through a visually rich system topology map. Together, Vertex Entropy and Situation Topology Visualization provide unparalleled insights into the root cause of any problem and full visibility into the complex relationships across IT processes, applications, and devices.
    • Strengthened Executive Team: Moogsoft made strategic hires of industry veterans focusing on product innovation, customer success, and long term growth. These include CFO Raman Kapur, COO Amer Deeba, SVP of Engineering Ranvir Wadera, SVP of Products Dan Grigsby, and CMO Sonu Agarwal.
    • Growing Channel Relationships: Moogsoft expanded key partnerships with managed service providers including HCL Technologies, Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services. The company signed an OEM partnership with Cisco to package AIOps with its Virtual Managed Services (VMS) service creation and delivery platform for managed service providers. Moogsoft AIOps was added to the Cisco general price list.
    • Expanded Customer Support and Success Team: Moogsoft launched a global services delivery program to onboard new customers and to continue supporting existing customers throughout their AIOps Journey. The program includes free online training, best practices on AIOps implementation and adoption, a named technical account manager, and ongoing support and training.
    • Doubled Engineering and Product Teams: To continue supporting customer growth and product innovations, Moogsoft doubled its engineering and product teams between US, UK, and most recently with the addition of a development team in India. This growth allows the company to respond to customer demands and deliver new AIOps capabilities with agility and quality assurance.

    “Today’s digital business depends on continuous innovation and demands all customer-facing services and applications to be ‘always-on’,” said Amer Deeba, Moogsoft COO. “At Moogsoft we are helping customers attain this goal by giving them real-time visibility across all data from their numerous services and applications. This helps to surface relevant events and automate event-to-resolution workflow, resulting in earlier detection of incidents, fewer tickets, and happier customers. New product innovations and strategic partnerships remain a big focus for us in 2019 and beyond as we continue helping customers achieve continuous service assurance for their digital transformation initiatives.”

    Other milestones of Moogsoft’s year included securing $40M in Series D funding led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity with participation from existing investors including HCL, Northgate Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Singtel Innov8, STTelemedia and Wing VC. In addition, the company was named one of the best workplaces by Inc. Magazine.

    Artificial intelligence for IT operations has exploded in recent years, with roughly 50 percent of enterprises on track to leverage AIOps technologies by 2020, according to Gartner.

    For more information about Moogsoft’s AIOps platform and its newest addition of customers, visit www.moogsoft.com, read our Blog or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

    About Moogsoft

    Moogsoft is a pioneer and leading provider of AIOps solutions that help IT teams work faster and smarter. With patented AI analyzing billions of events daily across the world’s most complex IT environments, the Moogsoft AIOps platform helps the world’s top enterprises avoid outages, automate service assurance, and accelerate digital transformation initiatives. Founded in 2011, Moogsoft has more than 120 customers worldwide including SAP SuccessFactors, American Airlines, GoDaddy, Yahoo!, and HCL Technologies. It has established strategic partnerships with leading managed service providers and outsourcing organizations including AWS, Cisco, HCL Technologies, TCS and Wipro. Moogsoft® and the Moogsoft logo are proprietary trademarks of Moogsoft Inc. All other products or names may be trademarks of their respective companies.

     

  • A Vendor Guy Goes To Monitorama

    A Vendor Guy Goes To Monitorama

    I attended my very first Monitorama this year, in Amsterdam, and I have thoughts!
    Monitorama Amsterdam
    Monitorama Amsterdam

    First of all, it’s deeply weird speaking at Monitorama when you work for a vendor in the monitoring and observability space, but you’re not there as a sponsor. This would be pretty odd at the best of times, but the crowd at Monitorama are next-level. They are very comfortable with highly technical content, so they get irritated very quickly with (what they perceive as) marketing fluff. “Down in the weeds” doesn’t even begin to describe it; most people had never heard of the sorts of things that are part of life in enterprise IT (AIOps, Netcool, Patrol or any of our usual suspects), but, on the other hand, everyone I met could engage in a multi-hour argument over which monitoring tool is worst.

    In fact, I would say that one of the highlights of Monitorama was the conversations in the hallway track. This is where all the Twitter loudmouths—I mean, “influencers” and “thought leaders”—who drive this industry congregate. If you manage to get into a conversation with them over coffee or beer, both of which were flowing freely, there can be a real exchange of ideas. I know I learned probably as much from those small-group chats as from the presentations on the big stage. I hope I was able to share some perspective in return.

    Heck, as ridiculous as it sounds, even the dress code was a challenge. At the events I attend as a vendor, there are basically two speeds: full suit-and-tie battle dress or a T-shirt with my employer’s logo. Neither case requires much thought when packing. Monitorama, though? I’m no longer credible in my old Thinkgeek shirts from my sysadmin days, but I’ll be laughed out of the room if I show up in a tie.

    Preparation

    I had answered the Call for Papers with a pitch about AI for distributed systems. Here’s my abstract:

    The IT industry is in the middle of one of its regular swings between centralization and decentralization, driven by increased automation of the network fabric itself, as well as new use cases such as IoT. With more and more processing and autonomy devolved to the edges, old assumptions about how to manage and operate a network have to change. It no longer makes sense to try to forward all the edge alerts to a central location for analysis, but central visibility on the health of the network is more important than ever.

    New techniques in AI-enabled observability hold the promise of helping NOC teams deliver better experiences for users of their networks, without requiring excessive manual work or heavy impact on on Operations teams’ personal lives. Machine learning enables knowledge to be captured and made available in context when it is most useful, accelerating incident resolution and improving user experiences.

    My first hurdle was that, although I have public-speaking engagements at least once or twice a month—and have done for some years now—I normally appear under the flag of my employer. This fact has both pros and cons. On the positive side, I can usually rely on a substantial library of slides that I (and others) have created in the past. I have some known high notes that I will be aiming to hit, and the call to action at the end is pretty explicit (“try our stuff”). The other side of the coin is that, because the audience is aware of these factors at least at some level, I have to work that much harder to earn their attention, as they assume they are being sold to. As a vendor spokesperson, I am also somewhat constrained in how wacky and off-the-wall I can get—although I do always try to push the boundaries. At one speech last year, I talked about bicycles for several minutes, to the consternation of the organizers, until they worked out what I was building up to.

    So I slaved away for some time over a hot Keynote, watched videos from past Monitoramas, consulted people in the industry whose opinions I respect and rocked up in Amsterdam pretty pleased with myself—to the point that I stayed out at In de Wildeman perhaps later than I should have on the night before Monitorama kicked off.

    Not Enough Preparation

    As speaker after speaker took the stage on Tuesday, I sank deeper and deeper into my seat, realizing that I had completely missed the mark—and as if that were not bad enough, several key analogies in my presentation had already been used by the first-day speakers. I did go to the party at Delirium Café, but left early to sleep the restless sleep of the nervous speaker. In the wee hours of the morning, I gave it up as a bad job, and spent several hours basically rewriting my entire talk in the light of what I had seen. Goodness knows what my neighbors thought of me rehearsing my lines, although I tried to keep the noise down.

    Here is the result in Slideshare, or you can watch the video here. That link should take you to the correct time stamp, but if not, scroll to about 5h30′ in.

    Katja Budnikov was also doing amazing sketchnotes (live!) of all the presentations. Here is the one from my session:

    Relief

     

    In the end it seemed to go down pretty well. I did my level best (honest!) to call on my own now-obsolete experience as a practitioner and on conversations with people who are more current than I am with the nuts and bolts of modern IT, rather than relying on the crutch of vendor boilerplate, and I think I was mostly successful in that.

    If you are working for a vendor and considering submitting to the Call for Papers at this sort of event, whether it’s Monitorama, DevOpsDays or Config Management Camp, I would definitely suggest test-driving your content as widely as possible. You probably have a lot of subconscious reflexes as a speaker that are not appropriate for the sort of audience these events attract. Even when you are conscious of them, it’s hard to eradicate them completely, but do your best.

    In the other direction, while I have enormous respect for the technical level of Monitorama attendees, some of them seemed to be at risk of losing track of the big picture. I would not want Monitorama to change its character as a techie’s conference, but I am grateful that we had a few presentations outside that mold, and I hope that I was able to provide some context for how all the wonderful technology gets used out there in the big bad world.

    — Dominic Wellington

  • Moogsoft Achieves Amazon Web Services Cloud Management Tools Competency Status

    Leading AIOps platform helps enterprise IT teams migrate to AWS by increasing operational agility without adding cost

    SAN FRANCISCO — SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 — Moogsoft, a pioneer and leading provider of artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), announced today that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Management Tools Competency status. This designation recognizes that Moogsoft AIOps assists AWS customers in managing AWS workloads and optimizing AWS operational management.

    Achieving the AWS Cloud Management Tools Competency differentiates Moogsoft as an AWS Partner Network (APN) member that provides specialized demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success with a specific focus on monitoring, event, and issue management. To receive the designation, APN Partners must possess deep AWS expertise and deliver solutions seamlessly on AWS.

    “Moogsoft is proud to achieve AWS Cloud Management Tools Competency status,” said Phil Tee, CEO of Moogsoft. “Moving to the cloud introduces new challenges for enterprises, but it’s categorically the right thing to do in order to become an agile business and unlock the full potential of the digitally-transformed world. Our team is dedicated to helping companies accelerate their AWS cloud migration by eliminating the barriers of operational agility without adding cost.”

    AWS is enabling scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions from startups to global enterprises. To support the seamless integration and deployment of these solutions, AWS established the AWS Competency Program to help customers identify Consulting and Technology APN Partners with deep industry experience and expertise.

    Moogsoft’s patented AIOps technology moves beyond diagnostic insights by using patented artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to proactively detect service-impacting incidents and orchestrate workflows across complex, hybrid IT environments. By automatically reducing alert and ticket volumes and clustering events into unique situations, operations teams are able to diagnose root cause and restore services faster.

    “We came to Moogsoft because we’re experiencing significant business growth and our legacy event management systems couldn’t scale, nor could it accommodate new data sources like AWS,” said Felix Gorodishter, Incident Operations Manager at GoDaddy. “Moogsoft was initially deployed as a layer on top of these systems, but now it is completely replacing the legacy systems.”

    Moogsoft AIOps is fully integrated with Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring, AWS CloudTrail for log aggregation, and AWS Systems Manager for automation.

    For more information about Moogsoft AIOps, visit the AWS Marketplace.

     

  • Moogsoft Extends AI Reach into IT Operations

    Moogsoft Extends AI Reach into IT Operations

    Moogsoft, at a Moogsoft 2018 AIOps Symposium last week, extended the reach of its IT operations analytics software out to where applications are deployed, rather than requiring data to be moved into a Big Data platform.

    Will Cappelli, CTO and vice president of product strategy for Moogsoft, said Moogsoft Observe, available in beta, discovers anomalies by applying algorithms where data is generated, versus requiring IT organizations go to the trouble and expense of moving massive amounts of data into a central data lake.

    Moogsoft Observe ingests time-series and metrics data in real-time and then applies artificial intelligence (AI) to detect incidents at the source of the problem. The single-agent technology can deployed anywhere, including cloud instances and on-premises systems and applications running containers and virtual machines.

    Cappelli noted Moogsoft Observe doesn’t require data scientists to configure it. IT generalists can employ Moogsoft Observe on their own without having to rely on a centrally managed IT operations analytics platform managed by someone else. Moogsoft claims this approach reduces the time to detect a problem by up to 60 percent while cutting nearly 90 percent of the storage and communication costs.

    Analytics generated by Moogsoft Observe can then be stored in the Moogsoft AIOps platform to enable IT organizations to run additional analysis against data collected from multiple data sources.

    Moogsoft also announced that version 7.0 of the Moogsoft AIOps platform will be available this October. This update adds Vertex Entropy and Situation Topology Visualization, algorithms that enable IT teams to visualize the root cause of an issue via a system topology map. That capability makes it possible to apply algorithms capable of generating contextual analysis that pinpoints the source of issues rather than generating a series of probabilities based on when a set of events occurred, said Cappelli.

    Advances in how AI can be applied to automate IT operations are now coming at a rapid rate. Those advances increasingly are becoming affordable for the average IT organization to employ. Most IT teams spend more time trying to determine the source of problem than they do fixing it once the root cause is discovered. AI technologies promise to eliminate many of the rote tasks that IT administrators are required to manually perform time and again, which will make it simpler to manage IT at scale. It also means more IT teams can expect to not have work as many odd hours of the day because fewer things are likely to go wrong. There may never be a perfect IT environment. But IT environments should be a lot more predictably reliable.

    Of course, the rise of AI undoubtedly will have a significant impact on the IT staff. Many IT administrators will need to be retrained as more processes become automated. It’s not likely the need for IT administrators will go away anytime soon. But as some tasks become automated, many entry-level IT roles will change dramatically or, in some cases, be eliminated. At this point, those changes are now all but inevitable.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Moogsoft® Announces Observe™ Expanding Its AIOps Platform with Real-Time Analysis and IT Problem Detection at the Source

    Groundbreaking new technology gives IT teams total observability into customer-impacting problems wherever they occur, across on-premises and cloud environments

    SAN FRANCISCO — August 30, 2018 — Moogsoft, a pioneer and leading provider of artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), today announced the launch of Moogsoft® Observe™. This groundbreaking technology extends Moogsoft’s core AIOps platform capabilities from centralized analytics outwards to the data source, providing IT teams with absolute visibility and total observability of customer-impacting problems wherever they occur.

    Moogsoft Observe is the only technology in the world that ingests time-series and metrics data in real-time and applies AI to detect incidents at the source of the problem. Observe stores only anomalous and contextual data, giving IT teams highly-advanced, specific knowledge to improve their online services and applications while dramatically lowering data transport, ingestion, and storage costs. Without requiring data lakes or data scientists to operate, Observe can be easily used by IT generalists including site reliability engineers and DevOps.

    “With Observe, we’re advancing the capabilities of AIOps to help IT teams better manage their services and applications in the face of a massive proliferation and decentralization of data,” said Phil Tee, CEO of Moogsoft. “Unlike other tools, Observe enables IT and DevOps teams to detect problems wherever their customers are, and allows them to identify the root cause for service disruptions sooner without the cost, complexity, and delays of collecting and analyzing all the data in a centralized location.”

    Moogsoft Observe is powered by a new suite of patent-pending algorithms developed for the most complex IT use cases in the world’s largest enterprise environments. By ingesting and analyzing data at the source and storing only anomalous and contextual data centrally, Observe enables trend and historical analysis of relevant, meaningful data but at a lower cost and with significantly reduced latency — reducing the time to detect a problem by up to 60% and cutting nearly 90% of the storage and communication costs per bit of information.

    “In our pure cloud and agile environments, we need a solution that could perform anomaly detection and proactively notify us that something’s wrong — putting people in front of dashboards isn’t an option anymore,” said Eli Chen, CTO of UJET, which beta-tested Observe. “Moogsoft’s AI-centric approach to the problem and extending it to time-series data analysis with its Observe offering is exactly the right approach to that problem.”

    Built for the enterprise, Observe is a single-agent technology that can operate across all environments, including cloud instances, workloads, and containers, as well as on-premises systems and applications.

    Observe is an extension of the Moogsoft AIOps platform but can be deployed independently. An early access beta program will be available this November. For more information about Observe and to register for the beta, click here.

    Additionally, Moogsoft announced today that version 7.0 of the Moogsoft AIOps platform will be available this October. This release introduces Vertex Entropy and Situation Topology Visualization — two innovative AI-based technologies that help IT teams understand the root cause of any customer-impacting problem through a visually rich system topology map. Together, Vertex Entropy and Situation Topology Visualization provide unparalleled insights into the root cause of any problem and full visibility into the complex relationships across IT processes, applications, and devices.

    Additional Resources

    About Moogsoft

    Moogsoft is a pioneer and leading provider of AIOps solutions that help IT teams work faster and smarter. With patented AI analyzing billions of events daily across the world’s most complex IT environments, the Moogsoft AIOps platform helps the world’s top enterprises avoid outages, automate service assurance, and accelerate digital transformation initiatives. Founded in 2011, Moogsoft has more than 120 customers worldwide including SAP SuccessFactors, American Airlines, Intuit, GoDaddy, Yahoo! and HCL Technologies and has established strategic partnerships with leading managed service providers and outsourcing organizations including AWS, Cisco, HCL Technologies, and Wipro. To learn more, visit www.moogsoft.com.

    Moogsoft® and the Moogsoft logo are proprietary trademarks of Moogsoft Inc. All other products or names may be trademarks of their respective companies.

     

  • AIOps: Managing the Second Law of IT Ops

    AIOps: Managing the Second Law of IT Ops

    Or, why IT systems keep breaking

    The tension between the two halves of DevOps is long-standing, going back long before the term was even invented. What underlies the split between Development and Operations is a fundamental difference, like an actual physical law. Let’s explore that analogy together.

    IT Ops is fundamentally a constant fight against entropy, meaning disorder. Sysadmins expend significant energy trying to keep everything up and running, in a process which can sometimes feel like trying to shore up a sandcastle while the tide is coming in. Systems are constantly breaking down; users need changes made that introduce risk; and, as if that wasn’t enough, the whole shebang is constantly under attack from malicious outsiders. It’s no wonder that sysadmins have a reputation for being a bit grumpy!

    Homer: In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
    It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.

    In contrast, Dev actually increases the level of entropy. Every new release, be it as small as a one-line fix or finding that errant semicolon, is a change that has to be made, reducing the order that Ops fights so hard to maintain. Dev is entropogenic, embracing change as a positive force.

    The interaction between Dev and Ops is analogous to the second law of thermodynamics: Entropy can only increase over time, unless energy is introduced to the system from outside. In other words, unmanaged change will eventually cause something to break, unless people put in continuous effort to prevent those breaks.

    Thermodynamics: Lots of Heat, not Much Light

    These conflicting goals, taken to extremes, can get unhealthy, with Ops actively fighting change or Dev going around Ops to increase their velocity of change. Left unchecked, this tension can turn into a vicious cycle, as frustration with the “Department of No” drives developers into unmanaged “shadow IT.”

    The good news is that the analogy with hard laws of physics is not perfect. The process of increasing entropy is not irreversible, and does not require constant inputs of energy to prevent. New agile approaches to IT Ops are emerging that are light and flexible, taking their structure from that tension. In the physical world, this is called “tensegrity,” and was originally formulated by Buckminster Fuller, one of those annoying polymaths who seem to make breakthroughs in every field they touch.

    Tensegrity structure
    Tensegrity structure

    IT Ops needs its own equivalent to tensegrity, a flexible, holistic structure that is able to embrace change while maintaining its shape. Structures that try to resist change through rigidity are brittle and ultimately fragile.

    Today, this flexible strength is enabled by AIOps, a term coined by Gartner to describe a new way of operating IT, based on augmenting human skills with automated analysis enabled by modern algorithmic and machine-learning approaches.

    Complexity Breeds Complexity

    Modern IT is too complex for any single person or even team to keep track of, instead requiring multiple specializations. In turn, each of these functions requires its own specific support tools that enable that particular role. Beyond a certain point, it becomes very difficult to combine these partial views to gain a holistic understanding of what is actually happening in the environment.

    Because of the scale of modern IT environments and the sheer rate of change that businesses require, old-style rules-based “Managers of Managers” can no longer keep up, requiring more effort to build and maintain their worth. Especially as infrastructure becomes more and more self-modifying in response to changing conditions and demand, IT Operations needs to accelerate just to keep up.

    AIOps brings developing issues to the attention of sysadmins before they become visible to customers and end users, and gives them the tools to collaborate effectively between different teams and specialist roles to avoid outages or restore service quickly and efficiently. In this world, automation is used to augment the capabilities of the human operators to make them more effective, letting people concentrate on adding value, not just fighting fires.

    This is how Ops can get out of the business of fighting Dev, and instead become a supportive partner. AIOps can catch issues that are affecting services and flag them to the right people early on, including the DevOps engineers that are responsible for production support.

    For developers, one of the fears around DevOps is that in “picking up the pager,” they are opening themselves up to a constant stream of irrelevant alerts. Old Ops hands nod wryly at this, or maybe try to share their personal approach to filtering the noise. Instead, AIOps ensures that only valid, actionable alerts get as far as being shown to a human being and taking up their valuable time.

    Eyes on the Prize

    It’s not all roses. As the AIOps market begins to mature, there is a certain amount of “algorithm-washing” going on, with more and more vendors trying to claim that either their legacy tool was AIOps all along, or that their one-trick pony is actually a whole three-ring circus. What gets lost in the excitement is what all of those algorithms are actually supposed to achieve.

    Me too!
    Me too!

    In considering a shift toward AIOps, the goal should not be simply to build a better mouse trap, meaning a smarter filter for monitoring events. The success of the project can be measured not so much in the mathematical results of the algorithms, but in the smoother exchange between the human users. This easier collaboration is especially important across team boundaries, whether these be different specialist units within the Ops function or developers and software engineers who need to work with Ops to understand the performance of their code in production.

    The benefit of transforming operations this way—moving from sequential, waterfall Ops to abile, collaborative Ops—is to turn DevOps-enabled teams into a sort of perpetual-motion machine, able to continue operating without requiring constant massive inputs of energy from outside the system. Modern applications and the complex infrastructures that support them cannot be managed with the sorts of rigid, cobbled-together, industrial approaches that were appropriate in the mainframe days. AIOps is the agile, flexible approach that can not only accomodate that complexity, but thrive on it.

    — Dominic Wellington