OpsRamp today announced its AI-enabled IT operations management (AIOps) platform now has the ability to analyze network flows and communications traffic.

Ciaran Byrne, vice president of product management for OpsRamp, said the new analytics capabilities will make it possible for IT teams to correlate the IT events OpsRamp already tracks on servers and storage systems against multiple types of traffic moving across a corporate network.

OpsRamp is based on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that simplifies IT adoption of AIOps without having to build and maintain their own management platform or install an AIOps platform on their own infrastructure.

Rather than acquiring a separate platform to analyze network traffic, OpsRamp is adding an OpsRamp NetFlow monitoring module, for analyzing packets using the NetFlow protocol developed by Cisco, and an OpsRamp Unified Communications monitoring module, for analyzing voice and collaboration data.

OpsRamp NetFlow provides real-time diagnosis of network latency across wide area networks (WANs). It generates alerts based on network traffic utilization, and delivers insights into network utilization patterns by identifying source, destination, protocols and applications that impact services.

OpsRamp Unified Communications works in a similar way, surfacing alerts and insights about traffic patterns impacting, for example, Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

With more employees working remotely, the need to analyze network traffic has become more acute, said Byrne. Network performance degradations can have a major impact on overall application experience, Byrne said.

Communications and collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams pose particularly stubborn challenges, because they offer IT teams little to no visibility into that traffic, Byrne said.

It’s unclear whether – and to what degree – networking and other IT operations will converge, but as AIOps platforms become more accessible, the ability to correlate IT events across multiple infrastructure classes as they transpire will steadily improve. While that may not lead to IT role consolidation anytime soon, it should enhance the level of collaboration teams can achieve.

In the meantime, AI is poised to have a profound impact on how IT environments are managed. The amount of time spent in “war rooms” performing root cause analysis can be sharply reduced through the use of machine learning. As algorithms surface insights, IT teams will be better able to proactively address issues before they have a major impact on application performance and user experience. It may take time for IT teams to fully trust AIOps platforms, but in the near future, IT professionals will avoid working for organizations that don’t have such platforms in place. For IT professionals, keeping complex application environments running without AIOps platforms will be nearly impossible.

Of course, transitioning to any type of new IT management platform is no small undertaking. However, as AIOps platforms continue to evolve, the overall cost of managing IT should also decline as leadership justifies the costs of these tools.