Introduction
It’s just been a few months since IBM acquired Instana, but we’ve been working hard to make the world of AIOps and Observability a better place. Recently, the two sides of the equation became a little bit closer with the release of some new integration points. Instana and IBM have integrated Instana’s industry-leading Enterprise Observability Platform for cloud-native microservice applications with IBM Watson AIOps. This combination provides a powerful predictive analytics platform for incident event management in cloud operations and DevOps.
What is Enterprise Observability?
Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform discovers and maps all applications, services, infrastructures, events, and their interdependencies automatically. Instana ingests all observability metrics, traces each request, profiles every process, and updates application dependency maps in real-time to deliver context and actionable root cause analysis and feedback. Instana never uses sampling or partial traces. Instana Analytics enhancements optimize application performance, enable innovation, and mitigate risk to help DevOps add value and efficiency to the pipeline.
What Is Watson AIOps?
It’s a natural fit between Intana’s Enterprise Observability Platform and Watson AIOps, specifically the IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps. According to the IBM website…
IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps is an AIOps solution that
deploys advanced, explainable AI
across the ITOps toolchain so you can
confidently assess, diagnose and resolve incidents across mission-critical workloads.
Observability and AIOps – Together at Last
The Enterprise Observability Platform provides rich incident event data for Watson AIOps to enable an end-to-end solution for correlating, analyzing, and responding to application and infrastructure events. Watson AIOps enriches incident root-cause analysis performed by Instana with additional context. It incorporates data from other structured and unstructured sources including other events, tickets, chats, and runbooks to generate predictive actions or to automatically remediate incidents with procedures contained in Watson AIOps runbooks.
According to a survey by the AIOps Exchange, 45% of businesses are using AIOps for better root cause analysis and to help predict potential problems. The Enterprise Observability and Watson AIOps integration brings together unique capabilities and a value proposition currently unmet on the market:
- Instana performs enriched root-cause analysis of incidents — with additional context from Watson AIOps, including data from other structured and unstructured sources such as events, tickets, chats, and runbooks.
- Watson AIOps performs automatic remediation via runbooks — of incidents detected by Instana
- Watson AIOps ChatOps coordinates remediation — of incidents detected by Instana
Modern application architectures, especially Cloud-Native Applications, can have more difficult problems to solve due to a lack of visibility into application, service, and infrastructure — leading to siloed teams, tools, and processes. A data explosion has made life more difficult for ITOps teams when it comes to managing their stack using manual methods. Meanwhile, complexity up and down the application stack has stretched the ability of Dev+Ops teams to understand their data and respond quickly.
Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform combined with IBM Watson AIOps solves these problems by detecting incidents and identifying the root-cause automatically, which is then enriched with additional contextual data by Watson AIOps. Watson AIOps either predicts a remediation suggestion and/or runs a predefined runbook to resolve the problem automatically. It enables application teams to decrease MTTR, reduce level of effort and costs, more adroitly meet reliability objectives, and improve and streamline collaboration and resolution of incidents.
Softacus Services
We, in Softacus, are experts when it comes to consulting and service delivery of IBM software products and solutions in your business. We help our clients to improve visibility and transparency when licensing and managing commercial software, providing measurable value while increasing efficiency and accountability and we are providing services in different areas (see Softacus Services).
IBM ELM extensions developed by Softacus are free of charge for the customers who ordered IBM ELM licenses via Softacus or for the customers who ordered any of our services. If you are interested in any of our IBM ELM extensions, you found a bug or you have any enhancement request, please let us know at info@softacus.com.
Related and Referenced Topics
Blog Articles:
Basics of Links and Link Types in IBM DOORS Next Generation - learn the basics about the linking and link types in IBM DOORS Next.
Linking Techniques in IBM DOORS Next - article explaining basic concepts and showing multiple ways of creation of links between artifacts.
Link By Attribute Feature in IBM DOORS Next - the article explains how to use the "Link by attribute" function to automatically create, update, or delete one or more links between artifacts based on values in the attributes of the artifact.
Softacus Widgets:
Link Switcher - widget developed by Softacus, that converts the context of artifacts links in a very short time.
Module Link Statistics - extension that provides users with a quick overview of the amount of the links in specific link types in a module.
Link Type Change- extension developed by Softacus designed to enhance the functionality of DOORS Next Generation by allowing users to manipulate the direction of a link or convert it to another type of link.
Links Builder- extension that allows the users to create a link between two artifacts in DOORS Next Generation according to the certain rules.
Link by Foreign Attribute - this extension allows users to create links between artifacts in the selected module(s), based on the attributes values.
Show Attributes of Linked Artifacts - this extension shows the attributes and links of the artifact that is currently selected.
