As companies migrate from private networks to cloud services, service providers are determining how to answer demands for five-nines availability. Organizations continually add more mission-critical applications and services, which in turn require high availability – allowing only five minutes and 15 seconds a year when applications/services will be unavailable.
This demand is not a new one, and is only accentuated by the impact to the business of resources that aren’t accessible. Bottom line – employees, customers, and supply chain partners are not able to access the resources they need to work, to create value.
Is it possible or even reasonable to expect that a service will be available every minute of every day? Even four nines – or 52 minutes and 36 seconds per year or three nines allowing 8 hours and 46 minutes of downtime is a stretch.
Implementing AIOps to improve application availability
When you take into consideration maintenance, upgrades, and uncontrollable events, achieving service level agreements (SLAs) will require significant investment and upkeep. Experts recommend that network operations develop a proactive plan and take the initiative to adopt AIOps to achieve SLAs:
- Use of established network configuration
- Monitoring and troubleshooting networking issues
- Adherence to best practices
- Automation and Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning to flag potential malfunctions before they disrupt service
- Attention to software – specifically out-of-date or unpatched software
- Test backup and disaster recovery plans
One step ahead
Aggressive SLAs demand that network operations detect failures before the customer experiences a service outage or complains about service degradation.
Automation based on analytics will optimize service levels and improve service availability. Implementing AIOps and a network controller across all layers enables operational efficiency. The automation enables network operations to:
- Triangulate multiple alerts from the network, an application, and the infrastructure indicating the same root cause problem
- Identify root cause, key symptoms, and affected population of service-impacting issues
Automation, relying on advanced AI/ML, is also foundational to meeting availability SLAs. Organizations should select an AIOps application that can:
- Detect, triage, and mitigate negative customer impact caused by change management
- Sustain optimal performance over time with dynamic adjustments made to performance baselines across billions of dimensions and metrics
- Introduce new applications, hardware, or software upgrades without risk
- Enable continuous innovation and deployment while limiting unintended and unexpected problems
Meticulously layered thinking
To achieve service assurance, organizations need integrated applications that work through the entire event pipeline from observation to analysis and action, enabling intelligent automation across all layers of service delivery.
Besides providing the best possible customer experience, organizations are able to maintain operational costs. Staff is available to support onboarding new customers and implementing new projects that increase revenues.
Implementing AIOps with network automation enables operations to detect failures early – before the customer experiences a service outage or complains about service degradation.
By introducing AIOps, technology organizations will have a framework for bringing performance management across service operation units. As networks become more complex and customers expect and need higher levels of service, organizations will rely on automation that only AI/ML can provide.
