Why the Modern Enterprise needs an Early Warning System

Today’s enterprises are embracing digital transformation and modernizing their infrastructure to deliver products faster and stay ahead of the competition. Here at LogicMonitor, we usually see the result of this modernization as a distributed and hybrid IT infrastructure that allows enterprises to optimize factors like cost and security while still realizing the benefits of being able to scale and deploy faster. However, this modern hybrid infrastructure changes how we think about monitoring and most traditional monitoring products are no longer sufficient to achieve comprehensive monitoring. Without comprehensive monitoring, enterprises risk expensive downtime. While they are doing everything they can to avoid this downtime, in reality, enterprises are spending most of their time reacting to problems to do so. Modern enterprises need something that can warn them before issues occur and help them prevent problems instead of reacting to them. At LogicMonitor, this is exactly what we are building with our AIOps early warning system.

Early Warning In the Cloud and On-Premises

Modern hybrid infrastructures typically have a mix of resources in the cloud and others running on-premises in physical data centers. In many of these cases, applications are running in containers to standardize application management and deployment across environments. Again, this mix provides enterprises with the best of both worlds and allows them to fine-tune cost, security, scalability, deployment speed, and more, but is far more complicated to monitor. Most monitoring products available specialize in monitoring only one type of infrastructure (e.g. cloud or on-premises infrastructure), and as a result, we see enterprises using multiple monitoring platforms and even dedicating full-time staff to managing the vast amount of configuration required and data coming out of these monitoring platforms. Of course, they are trying to prevent downtime at all costs, but the reality is that these approaches aren’t scalable and typically result in IT operations spending all their time reacting to problems and trying to minimize the resulting downtime.

Prevent Potential Downtime

Downtime is expensive, driving up company costs by factors up to sixteen. A recent survey revealed that downtime is rampant, with 96% of IT decision-makers who responded reporting at least one major outage in the past three years. According to the same survey, 51% of these outages were avoidable. But when the majority of time is spent putting out fires, IT operations teams do not have the time or resources to switch to a proactive model where the focus is on avoiding outages instead of minimizing their impact. LogicMonitor’s AIOps early warning system will provide IT operations with the information they need to make the switch to proactively preventing problems instead of reacting to them.

Specifically, LogicMonitor’s AIOps early warning system will detect the warning signs and symptoms that precede issues, such as patterns or anomalies in alerts or performance data, and warn users accordingly. These early warnings will be able to trigger actions, such as integrations and custom scripts, to prevent issue occurrence. By warning users sooner, this early warning system will help enterprises prevent outages, saving them time, money, and avoiding negative impact on their brands. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) based algorithms will be used to detect warning signs and symptoms preceding issues, similar to how a doctor identifies symptoms that (if untreated), might lead to major illness. These algorithms will be manifested in what is known in the monitoring industry as Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) – based features such as anomaly detection, dynamic thresholds, root cause analysis, correlations, and more. Together, these features underlying LogicMonitor’s early warning system will intelligently identify signal from noise to surface the most important information, make this more actionable by adding context, and subsequently prevent failures by tying into a robust automation framework, helping teams to significantly improve mean time to repair (MTTR) and successfully prevent downtime.

This early warning system will operate on top of LogicMonitor’s existing hybrid infrastructure monitoring platform to enable IT operations teams to prevent problems while saving time with just one platform. LogicMonitor’s breadth of coverage, with over 2000 out of the box monitoring templates providing coverage for everything from the cloud to systems you’d find in a traditional on-premises environment (e.g. servers, switches, storage arrays, etc.) to containers and the applications running within them, is unmatched. This comprehensive coverage enables the early warning system to identify and help prevent issues across the entire complex, distributed modern IT infrastructure. Additionally, LogicMonitor’s built-in automation and pre-configured defaults (e.g. alert thresholds) based on domain-specific best practices, enable teams to spend more time innovating and less time managing their monitoring.

Modern enterprises going through digital transformation can’t afford for traditional monitoring to slow them down and prevent them from fully realizing the benefits that digital transformation enables. These enterprises need monitoring that is intelligent enough to help prevent failures across their entire complex and distributed infrastructures, such as the LogicMonitor’s early warning system.