AIOps for Small Businesses

Did you know that 20% of businesses fail within their first year of operation, and 50% of businesses fail within the first five years? The reality is that people won’t continue to use a product or service that’s constantly struggling with downtimes or outages. With so many factors determining whether your business sinks or swims, it’s important to take action early! Find out how an AIOps solution can eliminate these issues so that your small business succeeds in today’s technical landscape!

What is AIOps?

Artificial intelligence for IT operations (or AIOps) uses machine learning models and big data to collect, process, and analyze data from multiple sources. AIOps tools centralize the operations management process and display everything on one dashboard. This allows DevOps and IT teams to make sense of data quicker and automate different aspects of IT operations workflow.

In some cases, AIOps tools also help with IT infrastructure and performance monitoring, providing streamlined information and metrics around the clock. These monitoring tools also reduce the amount of alert volume you receive from incidents, which helps to narrow your focus to the alerts that truly matter. Check out our “What is AIOps?” blog post to learn more!

How can AIOps Help Your Business?

No matter what your business does, one thing is guaranteed: you generate a lot of data. Collecting and analyzing that data is critical for making intelligent business decisions. One study shows that 95% of businesses struggle with managing unstructured data, and 97.2% of companies are investing in big data and AI currently. 

This is why it’s important to understand how AIOps can help your business stay ahead of the game. But how exactly can an AIOps tool help your business?

Cutting Costs

Small businesses often face a very common constraint: costs. AIOps tools help with optimizing data processes such as collecting, analyzing, and digital transformation. Implementing an AIOps solution at your business results in real-time, higher quality data management which can greatly expand your revenue sources. 

Furthermore, automating your data workflows means your hired staff can focus on how to utilize your data to improve your business. This cuts down on the time that would normally be spent trying to make sense of the data. 

Data Trends & Marketing Opportunities

As the quality of your data increases, you may start to notice patterns that pop up. These data patterns, or data trends, can help you identify potential business opportunities faster. Having knowledge of what parts of your business model are performing better than others allows you to capitalize on those trends.

This paves the way for discovering new marketing opportunities for your business. Sometimes these opportunities are not apparent until it’s too late. With an AIOps tool, you can confidently make business decisions which are backed by data and metrics.

Optimizing Resource Planning & Allocation

AIOps can do more than just save your business money and identify marketing opportunities. These tools can also help you optimize your resource planning and aid in the allocation of resources as necessary. As mentioned earlier, AIOps solutions allow you to redirect the energy, time, and focus of your staff from analyzing data to researching how to use the data. This cuts down on time-consuming workloads and allows you to focus on your end-users and improving their customer experience.

Once the data has been structured and transformed, it creates potential for actionable business insights. You can appropriately plan and allocate your business resources based on the information you generate and analyze. Planning for outages and maintenance becomes a lot easier when you have more observability into how your customers interact with those resources.

What’s more, some tools specialize in predictive analysis, analyzing historical data to establish a predictive model for your business’ IT infrastructure. This foresight allows you to prepare ahead of time for any issues!

Alert Monitoring

When an incident happens in your infrastructure it triggers an alert. Because one piece of your infrastructure is now out of service, other pieces may also start triggering alerts. In some cases the alerts pile up and can quickly become overwhelming. AIOps solutions can help with this problem! 

Many AIOps solutions can use root cause analysis to determine what the core issues are. This helps you focus on only the alerts that really matter and cuts down on your mean time to resolution, or MTTR. 

What to Consider When Buying an AIOps Platform

There are several factors you should consider when purchasing an AIOps platform such as cost, use case, and features. 

Use Case: You should also consider your specific use case for the AIOps solution. One solution might work better for IT infrastructure monitoring, while another might be better suited for analyzing customer data. Determine what your use case might look like and look around for a tool that can meet your specific needs.

Features: It’s a good idea to compare the features of different AIOps solutions as well. For example, many solutions offer feature sets that overlap, such as displaying the curated data on a centralized dashboard. However, some solutions let you customize that dashboard more than others. Consider what features are most important for your business and look into what each AIOps tool can do that sets it apart from the rest.

Cost: You should always consider the cost of any software or hardware when looking for a new solution. This is especially true at a small business where every dollar counts. Some AIOps tools are free, while others can cost upwards of thousands of dollars every month. 

The Best AIOps Platforms for Your Business

AIOps platforms primarily focus on businesses with large tech stacks that produce immense quantities of data. For that reason, there are not as many AIOps solutions that cater specifically to smaller businesses. That said, there are still several good options for AIOps platforms that work well for small businesses!

LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor is an infrastructure monitoring and observability platform that uses AI technology to detect patterns of alerts and performance anomalies. This tool specializes in data forecasting, which analyzes past performance metrics to establish predictive analytics and trends for entire infrastructures.

Use Case: LogicMonitor is more commonly used by mid-sized companies, but also is used by small businesses. This product is ideal for anyone who is seeking to predict or detect trends in data before they cause issues to critical business infrastructure.

Features: LogicMonitor is best known for its data forecasting, root cause analysis, and dynamic threshold abilities. You can analyze past data to discover trends, identify the root cause of issues in real time, and set dynamic thresholds which reflect a resource’s performance range.

Cost: LogicMonitor offers a free trial. Pricing information is not publicly available. Instead, you can reach out to LogicMonitor for a pricing quote.

New Relic

New Relic provides a Software-as-a-Service tool that specializes in web and mobile application performance management. It integrates with apps in both cloud and datacenter environments. This service leverages applied intelligence to eliminate problems, remove redundant alerts, and identify the root cause of issues. New Relic offers these services for free, which makes their product ideal for first-time AIOps users who need an affordable solution!

Use Case: New Relic is most used by enterprises in the Computer Software industry, but works well for businesses of all sizes. As mentioned before, this is a great solution for anyone who’s in the market for a solution that works on a budget.

Features: New Relic provides notable instantaneous anomaly detection, alert and event correlation, and automatic root cause analysis. New Relic can identify changes across all applications and services. It also can reduce alert redundancy by up to 80% with its alert-event correlation features. Using both of these allows New Relic to perform automated root cause analysis to give you actionable insight into the core of your business’s infrastructure issues.

Cost: New Relic offers their services for free! You can also pay for higher tiers, which allows you to scale this service with your needs.

BigPanda

BigPanda is an AIOps platform that provides unified analytics, which reduces the amount of outages and incidents within an infrastructure. The automation functionalities of BigPanda set it aside from other AIOps tools. You can automate every part of the process from ticket creation to incident triage.

Use Case: BigPanda works for businesses of all sizes. This solution is best suited for anyone who’s looking to automate their entire incident management process.

Features: BigPanda offers event correlation, root cause analysis, and level-0 automation features. You can aggregate data sources from across your business’s infrastructure to identify small events before they turn into outages. With BigPanda, you can also streamline the incident response lifecycle and accelerate your incident remediation.

Cost: Pricing information is not publicly displayed for BigPanda, however, they offer several tiers (including a custom tier) which you can inquire about on the packages page. 

More Resources

As data generation progresses, it’s important to stay on top of the data that your business is creating. Don’t wait around for the right time to look into a solution! Get ahead of the game with an AIOps solution fit for your business today. For more information about AIOps, click here! 

Have you used an AIOps solution before? Consider checking out our website and writing a review!