Complexity breaks correlation. Intelligence brings cohesion. This simple principle is what makes real-time asset intelligence a must-have for AIOps that is meant to diffuse complexity. To further create a context for the user, it is critical to understand service dependencies and correlate alerts across the stack to resolve incidents.
Why not just CMDB?
CMDB systems have been useful to break down configuration items into logical layers. But that is not enough, because they can become outdated very soon.
That is when connectivity among assets and their dependencies matter to remain relevant in real-time. This opens new possibilities for an enterprise to tap into. IT monitoring, change management, asset management and dependency mapping for troubleshooting are some areas that have a direct positive impact when enterprises have access to real-time asset intelligence linked to CMDB.
If your CMDB is not accurate with data management systems, it is time you start exploring asset intelligence and asset discovery tools.
Why is Asset Intelligence Critical to AIOps?
Asset intelligence is a critical part of AIOps. Unless you have a log and know about the assets that you have and how they are connected to each other, you cannot correlate to each other very easily. And that’s why real-time asset intelligence is required.
Third-party asset and dependency intelligence is an obvious next step, but those come with more challenges and complexities. Depending on a third party for asset and dependency intelligence would require a continuous feed of data on a regular basis. This process gets expensive and obsolete quickly.
Real-Time Asset Intelligence opens other Possibilities
With automation and discovery tools, CMDB can be kept up to date, in real-time. Real-time asset intelligence with automation enabled by AIOps opens many possibilities, and it contributes many benefits to an enterprise. These include:
IT Monitoring
For alerts and notifications, just a monitoring tool is not enough. The information sent by such a monitoring tool is not up to date. People rely on manual feeds, which are expensive and are not synchronized. Asset intelligence brings forth deep information that builds context which would otherwise be missing. Asset intelligence can point to issues corresponding to servers, topologies, networks, storage, apps or services.
Risk & Compliance Management
An organization must audit IT assets periodically to eliminate risks from the end of life/end of support cycle, vulnerabilities and ensure compliance with regulations and local governing laws. IT asset information is also maintained in many different places and in various forms, in spreadsheets, databases, ERP or CRM, or other systems, which makes it difficult to gather this information. All these challenges can easily increase compliance and vulnerability risks for any organization. AIOps tools automate the process of data collection, analysis and reporting, significantly reducing the operations costs while improving the accuracy and timeliness of the insights.
Change Management
No one has a clue if anything changed in the IT infrastructure. And, even if something does change, no one will know unless updates are alerted and stakeholders notified. With asset intelligence, you will not only know about the change, but before making the change, the solution will also tell you if a change is – or needs to be – made to a business service, as well as that change’s impact on other dependent business services. This helps you evaluate the impact and take measures to contain the blast radius before making any changes.
Asset Management
Asset intelligence provides a 360-degree view of asset inventory, dependencies, life cycle, performance, utilization and compliance. It provides thorough insight into, ‘What do we have versus what is out of date?’ You get to compare those states and inform compliance.
Dependency Mapping
AIOps-enabled asset intelligence also allows for dependency mapping, which is especially useful for troubleshooting work. With machine learning and artificial intelligence, complex environments can be quickly and more easily deciphered, and troubleshooters would know where issues lie. Asset intelligence tells the troubleshooter the most complex part of the problem and what should be addressed or what needs more attention. It maps dependencies that are affected by alert correlation, triaging, planning, and ticket resolution.
