Listicle

5 Key Ways AI
Can Supercharge
Observability
How AI will usher in a
new era of observability.
Pop culture often
Where were you when you first realized AI would be a big deal?
accurately predicts
You may have been watching Her, by Spike Jonze, in a dark movie theater. the future; sometimes,
Or, were you binge-watching the first season of Westworld? it exceeds even our most
educated guesses.
Pop culture is often where we first ponder the limits of technology. We do
it through movies and video games, while our grandparents’ generation
did it through science fiction novels by Ray Bradbury and H.G. Wells.
It’s fun to ponder all the possibilities new tech advancements will bring.
We’re still patiently waiting for a Delorean to travel through time,
though we’re not holding our collective breath.

5 Key Ways AI Can Supercharge Observability | Splunk 2

What do we mean by AI? AIOps is a subset of AI. What is artificial intelligence and
machine learning?
We define AI as a superset of multiple disciplines, that include The goal of AIOps is to improve the performance, availability, and The term machine learning (ML) is often used
machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI. It’s not just one reliability of systems and applications, increase efficiency, and interchangeably with the term artificial intelligence
thing. New use cases are emerging and disrupting the ways things reduce costs through drastic reductions in MTTD and MTTR. (AI), but ML is a subfield of AI. ML is a field of
have been done in the past. computer science that develops computer systems
AIOps achieves this by applying AI/ML, statistical analysis, and that can autonomously learn from experience by
One potential path forward will be AI assistants. You’ve maybe analytics to large amounts of data used in observability to drive processing the data they receive and improving the
already noticed them on your favorite social media app or work monitoring, troubleshooting, and remediation use cases. performance of specific tasks.
tools. They are here now and will only continue growing in number
An observability practice will evolve alongside rapid advances in AI Machine learning is the ability for
and popularity. Organizations will build, train, and embed generative
and AIOps. For now, there are five important use cases that we will computer systems to use algorithms
AI into user workflows to enhance investigation and response as a
cover here: and statistical models to continuously
key part of a leading observability practice. Vendors who include AI machine learning

assistants in their core offerings create streamlined opportunities improve the performance of
• Anomaly detection
for customers to address business-impacting issues in real time. specific tasks.
• Alert noise reduction
These tools enable better answers and faster actions, improving Deep learning is a specialized type of
MTTD and MTTR. • Probable root cause and directed troubleshooting an ML algorithm designed to mimic a
• Automation and remediation human brain’s neural network, allowing
Core AI-driven detection services can be applied across different deep learning

machines to use massive amounts of

use cases — building for centralization, not silos. AI will allow us • Proactive outage prevention
data to learn from their own actions and
to understand time series, correlations, and anomalies, identify
improve future outcomes.
and analyze the root cause, and recommend ways to remediate
Generative AI, also known as GenAI,
the problem.
broadly falls under the category of
Organizations are likely wondering how they can best harness machine learning. It simply refers to
the power of AI to help create an even more robust observability generative AI
algorithms that can create content,
practice. Machine learning is critical to building digital resilience — including text, imagery, video,
but simply incorporating AIOps into an observability platform is the simulations, code, audio, and more.
minimum. Organizations with mature observability practices likely Examples of generative AI include
already use machine learning to quickly find, fix, and resolve issues. tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, and
Those organizations gain immediate benefits and avoid the high Google Bard.
costs of downtime.

5 Key Ways AI Can Supercharge Observability | Splunk 3

How can AIOps benefit
my organization?
AIOps improves the performance,
availability, and reliability of
systems and applications,
AIOps is the application of AI and machine learning. increasing efficiency and
reducing costs through drastic
AIOps is not a market by itself and is often considered a mature approach
to observability, incident response, and — in some instances — IT service reductions in MTTA and MTTR.
management markets. The definitions of each of these markets include:

• Observability: Activities performed to gain visibility into distributed

systems/apps — allowing teams to get to the root cause of issues and
improve the system’s performance.
• Incident response: How an organization identifies an issue/incident,
minimizes its effects, contains damage, and remediates the cause to
reduce the risk of future incidents.
• IT service management: How an organization designs, builds, delivers,
operates, tracks, and controls information technology services offered
to customers.

5 Key Ways AI Can Supercharge Observability | Splunk

5 Key AIOps Use Cases

Anomaly Alert noise

detection reduction
Teams need to know something atypical is happening, which Finding a needle in a pile of needles is hard, and that’s what many
could be the precursor to an outage. The goal is always to avoid teams are trying to do when they have to sift through hundreds
downtime, using machine learning to detect and alert teams or thousands of alerts to figure out what’s relevant. Your solution
on anomalies and outliers. An out-of-the-box solution should should help you group related alerts from all your tools and data
do the trick. Anomalies can be intelligently identified when sources. This grouping can be done through a combination of
data deviates from an expected pattern or threshold. Dynamic, rules/policies and machine learning-based correlation. Grouping
adaptive thresholding can help reduce false positives by and prioritizing your alerts will help you make sense of what’s
adjusting for seasonality and teams can be alerted of outliers happening across your environment so that you can find and fix
when a signal significantly differs from its peers in the same problems faster.
period. Both anomaly and outlier detection can help teams
reduce unplanned downtime.

5 Key Ways AI Can Supercharge Observability | Splunk 5

 Probable root
cause and directed Automation and
troubleshooting remediation
When an incident occurs, machine learning can help you identify probable Automating common tasks can help teams reduce toil and improve
root causes and provide prescriptive guidance on where users should accuracy. These tasks can range from intelligently automating
look next. Knowing how similar episodes were successfully resolved in ticketing and creating communication channels to executing a
the past means teams don’t need to start from scratch and spend hours specific incident response workflow based on differentiating
reinventing the wheel. Highlighting similar episodes based on historical criteria. Additionally, your solution should offer trigger-based
data and surfacing what actions were taken to resolve the issue, any notes remediation for incident resolution, which saves users time fixing
on how the problem was resolved, and any linked tickets for even more redundant issues and helps teams reduce errors.
context about the episode will help teams quickly resolve an incident.

5 Key Ways AI Can Supercharge Observability | Splunk 6

 Proactive outage
prevention
To help customers prevent outages, machine learning can
help organizations predict and prevent incidents before they
occur. This can be done by assessing service performance and
forecasting future near-term performance. With this forecasted
performance, teams would have the opportunity to optimize their
services and potentially prevent issues from occurring in the
first place.

5 Key Ways AI Can Supercharge Observability | Splunk

Where does AIOps fit
in Observability? Observability

What is the connection

(ITOps and Platform Engineering)

• Improving signal-to-noise ratio

to business objectives? • Anomaly and outlier detection

• Adaptive thresholding
AIOps practices and capabilities enhance observability use cases. • Alert correlation and prioritization
Specifically, AIOps capabilities enable ITOps and Engineering professionals
to gain insights from large time series datasets to speed up mean time to • Code instrumentation
detect (MTTD), root cause analysis (RCA), and mean time to resolve (MTTR).
• Probable root cause analysis
AIOps capabilities available within observability tools assist teams with
automating or conducting large-scale analysis. These use cases augment • Assisted remediation
teams’ overall efficiency. Analysis is not fully automated, so humans are in the
loop. Examples include applying predictive analytics and anomaly detection
to get a head start and help avoid potential outages, reducing alert noise and
helping teams prioritize what’s important, and automating ticketing or the
creation of communication channels.

5 Key Ways AI Can Supercharge Observability | Splunk 8

Where we’re going,
we don’t need roads.
Michael J. Fox flies off into the future with that unforgettable line from
Christopher Lloyd. If only predicting the future of AI was that easy.

As machine learning becomes more widely adopted, there will

be increasing demand for “explainable AI.” Clear and transparent
explanations for how AI models arrive at their conclusions will be
important. Organizations will look to build trust in AIOps solutions,
which will lead to broader adoption and usage. It’s a flywheel. One
won’t happen without the other, but they may happen in tandem.

As organizations adopt AI and look to supercharge their observability

practice with AIOps, there will be an increased focus on prevention
and automation. The north star for observability will remain the
same — predicting and preventing issues before they occur. Find, fix,
and resolve business-impacting issues before they impact customers.

When issues do occur, AI will assist with automated resolution. This will
enable IT staff to focus on more strategic initiatives, such as optimizing
IT systems and applications for business outcomes. AI will boost an
organization’s digital resilience and observability practice.

5 Key Ways AI Can Supercharge Observability | Splunk

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are among the
most discussed topics in the IT industry today.

Despite the numbing buzz around AI and ML, it’s more than just an
abstract idea or hypothetical application. AI and ML are already
Read The Hidden Costs of Downtime to
powering tools that can give your business decision-making processes learn how to build resilience into a leading
a massive upgrade. The technology is here; it’s already proving itself in observability practice.
the market, and it’s increasingly being built with business in mind.

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