OpsRamp Looks to Fuel IT Operations Consolidation

One of the biggest challenges associated with DevOps is cutting through all the various platforms and applications alerts to make sense of what’s occurring in an IT environment, much less manage it. In fact, there’s been a pressing need of consolidate management tools for IT operations for quite some time now.

OpsRamp is now making just that case with the unfurling of Unified Service Intelligence, a set of integrated IT management applications that are all delivered using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model that makes it possible to unify multiple dashboards.

Deepak Jannu, director of marketing for OpsRamp, said that although there are more application programming interfaces (APIs) being exposed than ever, it’s still too difficult for IT operations teams to correlate data in a way that creates meaningful actionable intelligence. For the most part, IT operations teams are still swiveling between different consoles in the hopes that some insight will magically make itself apparent, he said.

To make it easier to separate the signal from the noise, Unified Service Intelligence combines discovery and monitoring health dashboards with incident management capabilities in single application layered with hundreds of best-practice monitoring templates to simplify IT administration.

Jannu noted many IT organizations struggle when transitioning to DevOps because they are confronted with a classic chicken-and-egg challenge. Most of them rely on legacy tools that are not integrated. Trying to modernize IT operations processes is simply too difficult without the right set of tools in place. The only way to make modern tools affordable for most organizations is to deliver them as a set of SaaS applications, he said.

As IT organizations find themselves embracing multiple clouds as well as emerging technologies such as containers, Jannu noted it’s now only a matter of time before IT operations reaches a breaking point inside most organizations. It was difficult enough trying to navigate different dashboards for IT infrastructure and applications running on-premises. The cloud, in most cases, just adds another series of platforms to an already-inflexible mix of isolated processes, he said.

Just as significantly, he added, an integrated platform also is key to cutting down IT operations fatigue. Most IT operations teams don’t discover critical issues early enough because it’s simply too difficult to understand what an “alert storm” being generated by disparate management tools signifies. After a while, the IT operations team becomes inured to all the alerts being generated.

Longer term, Jannu said OpsRamp will be better positioned to apply machine and deep learning algorithms to automate IT management than the average IT organization would be by running tools locally on its own. OpsRamp already generates 3 billion records of events a day, all of which can be used to inform artificial intelligence (AI) tools that require access to massive amounts of data to effectively train models. Locally installed IT management tools will never generate the required volume of data required to train an AI model.

It remains to be seen how fast the IT operations management space will consolidate. There are a lot of constituencies inside IT organizations that have a vested interest in one tool or another. That said, the writing on the wall heralding that consolidation already has been inscribed.

— Mike Vizard