Andi Grabner, a self-proclaimed DevOps activist who works for the software intelligence company, is the Director of Strategic Partner Enablement at the firm. He says his mission is helping developers, testers and operations teams become more efficient at their jobs by applying DevOps practices. In an exclusive Q and A with DevOps Online, he discusses how AI and DevOps are coming together and companies can do to make the most of it.

What’s the difference between the traditional monitoring and modern needs?

 Businesses need to understand their IT environment and how changes, or performance problems, affect the user experience. When you look back at traditional monolithic architectures, it was a solvable challenge, as the number of moving parts was known. However, today’s enterprise cloud environments are exponentially more dynamic, with more moving parts and a complex web of dependencies that is far more difficult to map and understand. Research has shown that a single web or mobile application transaction now crosses an average of 37 different technology systems or components.

As a result, traditional approaches to performance management have become largely redundant for IT teams, as they struggle to make sense of conflicting insights from countless monitoring tools and dashboards, each covering only a small fraction of the overall distributed system. It’s impossible to monitor modern user experiences with metrics that don’t have the full context from across the entire IT stack, which is why traditional monitoring is so outdated. Software intelligence led approaches that have AI and a common full stack data model at the core can provide instant answers into user experience in real-time and identify the precise root cause of any problems that arise, allowing IT and digital business teams to quickly resolve performance issues.

 Why has AIOps become much more important for organisations?

Every company is transforming into a software company, because applications now lie at the heart of every user experience. The way that companies win customers and retain their loyalty lies in their ability to offer seamless digital experiences and bring new features to market. This means that for all businesses, speed is of the essence. If you develop too slowly, the competition will overtake you and steal market share. Organisations have to break up monoliths into smaller focused business applications and services. Leveraging AIOps helps remediate problems quicker and allow for faster development and deployments by removing the fear of failure. Ultimately, the race is on to be able to deploy lots of high-frequency releases at scale without introducing bugs that hinder the user experience, which is why AIOps has become such a hot topic.

What’s the key to ensuring organisations can trust AI? 

AIOps is about leveraging the insights that comes from real-time, high-fidelity IT performance, scalability, architectural, user experience and business data that is flowing through the organisation and then combining it with smart auto remediation capabilities to trigger automated responses that improve outcomes for the business. Once you see AI alerting you to problems based on this data, that means that you can trust it to help you to automate traditional operational tasks. The culture is about trusting and leveraging AI so that you can focus on helping your company automate more, increasing the time for innovation and improving the outcomes for customers.

How do you see the role of operations changing in the future?

AIOps is set to cause huge changes within organisations, as infrastructure and cloud orchestration layers provide the requisite ingredients to facilitate autonomous operations and enable self-healing applications. As AIOps becomes the modus operandi for many IT departments, operations teams will become engineers with development skills that can mentor and help development teams architect and build better cloud native applications that can leverage the full potential of AIOps. This change in the operations skillset will help the development team ensure the code they are delivering is performant and build in remediations that kick in should problems occur.

The post What AIOps means to modern IT environments appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Hitachi and the cloud

The Japanese car firm, Hitachi, announced in the US recently that they will now be using end-to-end services to help customers with their cloud and multicloud journeys. Bobby Soni, chief solutions and services officer at Hitachi Vantara comments on the move. He says, “At HitachiVantara, we are creating people-centric services that empower enterprises to innovate and deliver business outcomes. Our newest capabilities can help our customers achieve fully managed, secure hybrid cloud and multicloud environments faster, and can deliver actionable insights for data-driven decision making.”

Compuware and Topaz

Compuware has announced they will be taking mainframe software delivery quality to the next level with Topaz Advancements and Open Legacy Integration. They also feel this will better speed and efficiency through improved reporting and support for complex programming that will simplify test results and improve software quality.

Dynatrace use AI for better digital business results

A firm that specialises in application performance management is expanding its software intelligence platform by using real time AI powered insights. Dynatrace, the company behind the announcement, hope this will drive better digital business results by adding digital business analytics to its current intelligence platform. It will also use cloud infrastructure monitoring and digital experience management.

WSO2 releases new configuration model

Open Source firm WSO2 is offering new capabilities that it believes will help organisations to tackle digital complexities. This includes providing RESTful APIs to enable customer self-service and built-in support for managing active user sessions. “As enterprises conduct more of their business online, developers need to implement IAM solutions that ensure both secure, easy access for users and simplified management for administrators—often across multiple systems and cloud domains,” said WSO2 Vice President – Security Architecture Prabath Siriwardena. “We are extending our commitment to empowering these developers with the newest version of our open source WSO2 Identity Server.”

The post From cloud to AI, here’s what’s new in IT this week. appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The digital performance management company’s participation in the programme will be available on SAP App Centre, providing SAP partners and customers with an innovative AI-powered, fully automated, stack performance monitoring solution for the Cloud Foundry stack on SAP Cloud Platform.

Matthias Scharer, vice president for business operations at Dynatrace, announced to Business Wire: “You need to have digital performance management built into digital services and applications in today’s hyper-complex, hyper-scale IT ecosystems.

“Being in the SAP App Center means Dynatrace’s powerful capabilities are available in easily consumable, preconfigured build packs. This helps those building and running applications on SAP Cloud Platform to monitor workloads with ease and fully optimise performance across hybrid and cloud native environments, and throughout the entire application lifecycle.”

With comprehensive application development services and capabilities, SAP Cloud Platform is SAP’s agile platform as-a-service (PaaS) for digital transformation.

‘Allowing businesses to leverage information’

The platform allows businesses to collect, manage, analyse and leverage information of all types, to extend and connect to business systems, and to innovate new edge scenarios to allow businesses to run better.

Marc Geall, senior vice president at SAP Cloud Platform Ecosystem, added to Business Wire: “The pressure to innovate faster while supporting performance has never been higher. Performance management is critical, and with the Dynatrace solution, partners are primed for building apps on our cloud. It extends the value of our innovation pack for SAP Cloud Platform to help optimize performance of apps based on SAP Cloud Platform.”

“SAP partners can use the Dynatrace solution at no cost to monitor their Cloud Foundry development environment while they create apps for SAP Cloud Platform – a real benefit for our partner community.”

Through Cloud Foundry build pack Dynatrace will also be available under a commercial license for customers and partners via the SAP App Centre to monitor workloads on SAP Cloud Platform.

Written by Leah Alger

The post Dynatrace joins SAP PartnerEdge appeared first on DevOps Online North America.