LogicMonitor Acquires Unomaly to Advance AIOps

LogicMonitor this week revealed it has acquired Unomaly, a provider of tools infused with machine learning algorithms that make it easier to analyze large volumes of log data.

Tej Redkar, chief product officer for LogicMonitor, said the acquisition of Unomaly will advance a previously announced AIOps initiative through which LogicMonitor will embed advanced analytics and automation capabilities into its core IT monitoring platform. Rather than requiring DevOps teams to acquire a separate platform to take advantage of AIOps, LogicMonitor contends AIOps is simply an element of the next logical iteration of an IT monitoring platform.

Unomaly will help LogicMonitor achieve that goal by identifying patterns in streaming log data that are indicative of anomalies that warrant further investigation, said Redkar. Unomaly works by first establishing a baseline for the IT environment. It then records a profile for each log event that includes the event’s structure, sources, frequency patterns and intervals. Similar profiles are then merged into one aggregated profile, with dynamic parameters to reduce the amount of data that needs to be analyzed by several orders of magnitude. If an anomalous event occurs within a rolling 60-second window on a single log source, Unomaly will bring those events together to identify and score a situation based on the type and number of anomalies.
Redkar noted this approach not only provides more context about the events but it also greatly reduces the amount of log data that needs to be stored. Unomaly is also designed to accept data in any format.

As IT becomes increasingly more complex, organizations of all sizes need more observability. However, because all the dependencies within the IT environment are becoming too complex to track manually, IT organizations will need to rely more on machine and deep learning algorithms to observe the IT environment.

Naturally, that increased reliance on algorithms will alter the role of IT operations teams. Most IT operations teams will find themselves supervising algorithms that are surfacing issues and making recommendations, said Redkar. Rather than eliminating the need for IT operations expertise, AIOps will be employed mainly to manage IT environments operating at a significantly higher scale, he noted.

It will take some time for this transition to play out as issues such as the explainability of AI models are worked out. Some of the lower-level functions within an IT operations environment undoubtedly will be eliminated, so job roles will change. However, many of those functions will be rote tasks that many IT professionals don’t especially like to perform.

IT vendors are, of course, involved in something akin to an algorithms arms race to infuse AI into their management platforms. In some cases, they will develop these capabilities themselves. In other cases, they will acquire startups to gain access to AIOps platforms. Most IT vendors will be mixing and matching a variety of AI technologies they developed themselves and acquired. Regardless of the path pursued, it’s no longer a question of whether AIOps will be applied to managing IT, but rather when.

— Mike Vizard