How AIOps is reshaping service delivery and future IT talent
Managed Service Providers’ (MSPs) need for greater efficiency and operational resilience is driving the adoption of AIOps, but IT professionals’ concerns around AI’s impact on the workforce remain — particularly for entry-level positions.
At the same time, the skills gap in ITOps is a growing issue. Around two-thirds of IT leaders report significant shortages in areas such as cybersecurity, AI, and cloud computing. This is heavily felt in the MSP industry, where businesses rely on skilled professionals to maintain infrastructure and manage evolving technologies.
Addressing these gaps requires MSPs to source and train emerging talent. Typically, this involves them learning the ropes through foundational tasks that provide exposure to core IT operations. Where AIOps raises concern is that it enables MSPs to automate some of these tasks, with reports predicting that 37% of entry-level IT positions will experience high levels of transformation due to AI.
So, what does AIOps bring to MSPs and how will the roles of new talent evolve as a result?
Why hybrid IT estates are fueling demand for AIOps and IT skills
Many businesses are using hybrid infrastructures to maximize the agility, scalability, and capability of their IT estates. But this adds complexity to infrastructure monitoring.
Consequently, ITOps professionals often face the challenges of continually onboarding new technologies for customers, eliminating blind spots in their infrastructure monitoring, and tackling operational inefficiencies.
MSPs’ ability to deliver and improve service quality can be augmented by both using AIOps and nurturing the IT skills of fresh talent, for instance by:
1. Prioritizing ongoing visibility and agility
Full visibility of IT environments is imperative to reduce the risk of downtime and performance degradation. With many organizations using continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices, ITOps teams must account for frequent changes that increase the likelihood of monitoring gaps. As their IT environments evolve, teams must also stay prepared to onboard or offboard new hosts and technologies, which can be streamlined with AIOps.
Monitoring equipped with extensive technology coverage, prebuilt monitors, and auto-discovery capabilities simplifies the process of identifying new components and eliminating blind spots in hybrid infrastructures. Junior ITOps professionals can gain hands-on experience assisting more senior staff with executing this process, helping them understand how to identify new hosts and the relationship between different components and services.
Additionally, ITOps teams can streamline the installation and decommissioning of components with monitoring that integrates with automation engines. For onboarding, this enables them to run scripts which automatically add new hosts to monitoring systems and apply the appropriate checks and thresholds. During offboarding, this integration automates updates to monitoring dashboards, plus removes alerts and data associated with the decommissioned component. Exposure to this allows entry-level professionals to learn the necessary checks for specific components and become familiar with lifecycle management.
2. Finding the needle in the haystack with enhanced anomaly detection
ITOps teams often face alert storms that require them to sift through notifications. And manually identifying the issues that have a genuine impact on business services is a time-intensive task. What’s more, alert storms create the risk of missing critical problems and delaying remediation.
AIOps uses machine learning algorithms to rapidly analyze high volumes of data at scale. By continuously learning from data patterns, AIOps can automatically distinguish between normal fluctuations and real issues, accurately pinpointing anomalies and irregularities that traditional monitoring tools might miss. It thereby reduces false positives and minimizes alert storms so teams can address critical alerts promptly.
AIOps also correlates events across an entire infrastructure, making it easier to locate the source of an IT issue. It can direct ITOps teams to the component where the problem originates from, improving overall operational efficiency. Junior staff can work with senior colleagues to carry out remediations informed by the insights, acquiring technical skills and expanding their knowledge of operational workflows and escalation processes.
3. Being preemptive with resource and cost optimizations
One significant advantage of AIOps is its capacity for predictive analytics. By analyzing historical data on resource usage and establishing trends, AIOps can predict potential issues before they occur. When combined with capacity planning reports, AI-driven infrastructure monitoring ensures ITOps teams are not over-provisioning or underutilizing resources.
As such, organizations can achieve more efficient use of infrastructure and drive cost savings. This preemptive approach lets ITOps teams reallocate resources in advance, reducing the need for firefighting and supporting a seamless user experience for their end customers.
In this instance, junior staff can familiarize themselves with the reports and dashboards, gaining exposure to data visualization tools. They can also help apply data-driven resource optimizations, learning to adjust configurations, provision more virtual machines, or refine storage allocation while improving their understanding of cost management.
Be ready for what’s next with AIOps
As hybrid infrastructures continue to evolve, the complexity of monitoring and managing IT environments will increase. The future of infrastructure monitoring lies in the automated capabilities of AIOps and training new talent to work hand-in-hand with it.
While AIOps capabilities operate behind-the-scenes and empower teams to maintain high service quality, junior staff can begin developing skills in problem-solving, capacity planning, cost management, and data analysis while growing their knowledge of managing hybrid IT estates.
As businesses use AI-driven capabilities, the responsibilities of entry-level professionals will adapt alongside technology so that they can support more innovative tasks carried out by senior staff.
Want to see how AIOps can benefit your infrastructure monitoring?