Forward-thinking teams are now looking to observability and AI for predictive analytics and proactive issue resolution to reduce downtime, enhance security, and improve user experience. Firms that fail to adopt observability are left with outdated, reactive monitoring solutions ill-equipped to manage increasing IT complexity.

This article discusses how observability and AI are becoming cornerstones for proactive IT decision-making, even as enterprise visibility grows more challenging.

The Evolution of IT Visibility: From Monitoring to Observability

IT teams have traditionally relied on monitoring solutions that track predefined metrics, logs, and alerts within specific IT components, often operating in silos. While effective for detecting known issues, legacy monitoring tools lack the capability to uncover hidden dependencies and root causes in today’s complex and dynamic environments. 

As enterprises plan for the future, many are moving beyond traditional monitoring to adopt full-stack observability for greater resilience and efficiency.

Proactive Problem-Solving with AI-Driven Insights

Full-stack observability provides a comprehensive, real-time view across the entire IT ecosystem, integrating metrics, logs, traces, and AI-driven insights. By delivering holistic, live insights into an IT environment’s health and performance, observability empowers IT teams with deep visibility into complex, distributed environments, enabling a shift towards proactive IT operations.

Consider the following scenario: a large enterprise’s IT operations team is responsible for managing an IT infrastructure that continues to increase in size and complexity. With this expansion comes an explosive increase in the volume of event data generated. To maintain optimal IT service levels while driving innovation and staying competitive, the enterprise adopts observability and AIOps to scale its ability to ensure the health, performance, and availability of critical systems. 

AI-powered observability platforms, such as Broadcom DX Operational Observability (DX O2), provide capabilities like cross-domain correlation, intelligent alarm management, and automated triage to optimize IT service levels across complex IT environments.

Improved User Experiences and Reduced Downtime

Unknown unknowns—issues or risks that are completely unforeseen or unanticipated—often emerge from complex interactions within systems and environments. These are problems that neither IT teams nor traditional monitoring tools can predict, as they fall outside the scope of known metrics, logs, and alerts. As IT environments grow more intricate, these unknown unknowns can lead to critical failures or security breaches if not detected early.

Observability reduces the occurrence of unknown unknowns by providing holistic, real-time visibility into every layer of the IT ecosystem. This enables IT teams to uncover hidden patterns, detect anomalies, and proactively address issues before they escalate into major disruptions. 

Also, IT teams can intelligently optimize application performance with user-centric metrics (e.g., real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring) to improve the user experience. Broadcom DX O2 provides these crucial metrics, enabling teams to understand the inner workings of their systems and applications.

Best Practices for Adopting Observability Platforms

Successfully integrating observability into existing enterprise IT ecosystems requires strategic alignment with broader digital transformation goals. Organizations should ensure that observability supports their overall goals of improving operational efficiency, enhancing customer experience, and driving innovation.

IT operations teams looking to implement an observability platform should prioritize scalability and interoperability when evaluating solutions. 

Future-Proofing Enterprise Observability

As enterprises evolve, their IT ecosystems inevitably become more complex—with a mix of on-premises, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures, along with container clusters, serverless computing environments, and more. 

Organizations should ensure that prospective observability platforms can integrate seamlessly across these diverse environments and technology stacks, providing unified insights that scale with the organization’s growth and technological advancements.

Observability for Enhancing Collaboration

Observability should serve as a catalyst for greater collaboration between IT teams and business units. When evaluating solutions, IT operations teams should prioritize features that facilitate seamless communication and alignment between these groups. 

IT teams bring the necessary technical expertise to implement observability solutions, while business units are instrumental in defining key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect user experience and business impact. By promoting cross-functional collaboration, organizations can ensure that observability efforts are closely aligned with both technical and business objectives. 

This collaborative approach ensures that observability not only monitors system performance but also delivers actionable insights that drive informed decision-making, fostering both technical improvements and business success. Leading observability platforms, such as Broadcom DX O2, include features like unified dashboarding, service observability, and third-party integrations to enhance IT-business collaboration across the enterprise.

Observability and AI Over the Next Decade

Most technology professionals are likely to agree that IT predictions for the next decade are, at best, uncertain. However, one thing is for certain: as enterprise complexity increases, the future of IT operations will be deeply connected to the integration of observability and AIOps. Full-stack observability, when combined with AIOps, empowers IT teams to detect issues proactively, predict potential problems, and automate responses—significantly reducing manual intervention and improving operational efficiency.

As organizations pursue greater innovation and operational efficiency, the ability to leverage observability and AIOps to dynamically optimize, streamline, and automate IT operations will become a competitive differentiator. 

Observability platforms like Broadcom DX O2 are uniquely positioned to support this future. With advanced capabilities like cross-domain correlation, intelligent alarm management, and automated triage, DX O2 is not only equipped to meet the demands of today’s complex IT environments but also prepared to scale and evolve with the needs of the future enterprise.

Contact an A&I team member today and find out how observability and AI can improve your IT operations for the future.

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One of the core challenges ITOps teams face is that they attempt to monitor and manage rapidly evolving cloud infrastructures with traditional tools and manual processes. As workloads grow, things slip through the cracks, resulting in overspending, outages, or security incidents.

AIOps offers a solution to this problem, using modern technology to scale and streamline cloud management. This article explores how AIOps can enhance ITOps in hybrid cloud environments and how organizations can get started with their transition.

Understanding ITOps Challenges

Cloud infrastructure enables companies to embrace the DevOps mindset of rapid iteration and deployment. However, these hybrid cloud environments also create significant challenges for IT teams, including:

Traditional ITOps is ill-suited to the rapidly expanding corporate cloud. Often, ITOps is heavily reliant on manual processes, which can’t keep up with cloud expansion and evolution. The transition to AIOps is necessary to keep pace with IT’s changing role.

The Key Pillars of AIOps

AIOps addresses the challenges of ITOps using modern technology. The primary components of AIOps include:

AIOps and Hybrid Cloud Management

Hybrid cloud introduces new challenges for ITOps teams that traditional approaches cannot solve. Some of the benefits AIOps brings to hybrid cloud infrastructure management include:

How to Get Started with AIOps

The shift from manual AIOps to automated AIOps can be a large one for an ITOps team. Following AIOps implementation best practices can streamline deployment and help you maximize return on investment.

Assessing Existing ITOps Processes

AIOps is intended to enhance ITOps processes. Before this is possible, your team must clearly understand the deployment’s goals and the potential benefits AIOps can bring. Some key steps include:

Selecting AIOps Tools and Technologies

The team should now have an understanding of what it needs in an AIOps solution. The next step is to evaluate available AIOps solutions to determine the best fit.

While this process may differ based on business needs, one important consideration is to select tools that are effective in hybrid cloud environments. On-prem and the various cloud providers’ environments all have different requirements, levels of control, and hosting capabilities. The AIOps solution must be compatible with all these environments. Otherwise, it creates silos and becomes just another tool for the team to manage.

Training and Skills Development

Transitioning from ITOps to AIOps requires training ITOps teams. With AIOps, you’re introducing a new tool with the ability to eliminate or streamline many of these manual processes. To assist ITOps team members with making the change, implement training on AIOps concepts and to help them build proficiency with the new technology they will be using.

Deploy AIOps with A&I Solutions

Hybrid cloud infrastructure creates significant business challenges as corporate IT ecosystems rapidly scale and evolve. AIOps has the potential to help you overcome these challenges by using ML and automation to eliminate manual processes and proactively address potential issues.

A&I Solutions can help your organization begin its transition from ITOps to AIOps. As a Broadcom Partner, we have extensive experience in deploying and optimizing AIOps solutions for companies of all sizes and industries. Broadcom AIOps solutions, such as DX Operational Intelligence (OI), DX Application Performance Manager (APM), and DX Unified Infrastructure Management (UIM) can help you streamline and simplify your IT operations and gain advanced insights into cloud apps and infrastructure. To take the first step on your AIOps journey, book a demo or talk to an A&I team member today.

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AIOps leverages the power of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to provide organizations with greater visibility into their IT environments and the ability to proactively and automatically identify and address potential issues. This article explores how AIOps is reshaping IT management and the various ways that AIOps can be used to enhance IT operations.

What Is AIOps?

AIOps is the practice of integrating AI, ML, and analytics into IT operations. These technologies improve efficiency and enable real-time identification and response to potential issues.

Data is essential to the success of an AIOps platform. AI solutions collect data from sources across the organization’s network, including logs, security alerts, metrics, and network data. This information is then fed into AI/ML systems to analyze. From there, AI can extract trends and anomalies, recognize patterns in system utilization, and perform predictive analytics.

AIOps systems report to human analysts, but they can also act on their findings. Automation streamlines processes and enables real-time management of potential issues or security threats.

How Can AIOps Benefit Businesses?

AIOps uses AI, ML, analytics, and automation to streamline and optimize business operations. It can be used in various ways to support IT operations and service management.

Predictive Analytics

AIOps platforms collect information from various sources within an organization’s IT and feed it into ML models. These models can identify patterns and anomalies within the data, sifting out the useful signal from the noise. Using this information, AIOps platforms can anticipate and prevent IT incidents or take steps to contain and mitigate them. 

For example, an AI-based threat management system may detect unusual behavior by a user account. It can proactively lock the account and notify security personnel of the compromise, limiting the potential damage that account can unleash.

Automated Root Cause Analysis

Root cause analysis is an essential but resource-intensive part of the IT troubleshooting process. While symptoms of an incident may be readily apparent and easily fixed, determining the underlying issue is more complex. Fixing these problems is also vital to prevent future incidents.

AIOps platforms have the context and analytic capabilities required to perform automatic root cause analysis. By automatically tracing the chain of events back to its origin, the AIOps platform streamlines the troubleshooting process and enables IT personnel to quickly and accurately diagnose and correct the underlying issue.

Performance Monitoring and Optimization

AIOps enables an organization to effectively monitor and manage IT performance in real time. AI systems have the scale and capability to ingest performance data from multiple sources, analyze it, and identify potential inefficiencies or issues.

The AIOps platform can also perform automated performance optimization of the organization’s IT infrastructure and proactively address potential issues. For example, the platform may detect that a web server is rapidly approaching 100% CPU utilization. By spinning up an additional server and load-balancing requests between them, the AIOps platform can proactively address the issue before it affects the user experience.

Incident Management and Response

Alert overload is a common challenge faced by security teams. With many IT solutions and security products, SOC analysts can struggle to weed out false positives and address true incidents.

AI is ideally suited to parsing large volumes of data and identifying anomalies and trends. AIOps can automatically identify and classify security incidents, enabling SOC analysts to more quickly pinpoint and address issues.

Beyond threat detection, AIOps can also recommend and execute strategies to address a security incident. By quickly deploying fixes across the entire corporate environment, AIOps minimizes the potential impact of an incident on the company’s business operations.

Capacity Planning

Capacity planning is a challenging problem in IT environments. Failing to allocate sufficient resources creates the potential for service outages and degraded user experiences. However, over-provisioning resources means that the company is wasting money on unneeded capacity.

AI algorithms can analyze an organization’s historical trend data and predict future resource needs. This not only enables the organization to proactively deploy additional capacity but can also enhance efficiency by optimizing resource utilization and consolidating underused systems.

Change Management

Every change to an organization’s software and IT architecture carries risk. A software update may include an unpatched vulnerability or break compatibility with other systems. Deploying a new server or API can overload firewalls or introduce security gaps.

AI-assisted change impact analysis can help minimize the potential risks associated with IT environment changes. AIOps can apply predictive analytics to assess the potential effects of a change and develop strategies for avoiding or mitigating any negative impacts.

Security and Compliance

AIOps offers the ability to enhance an organization’s security and compliance posture. Its threat detection and response capabilities reduce the mean time to remediation for security incidents, driving down costs. In fact, it’s estimated that using AI-driven insights can decrease the overall cost of a data breach by over $225,000.

Aside from reducing the organization’s vulnerability to cyberattacks, AIOps can maintain an organization’s regulatory compliance. Automated monitoring helps identify and correct any potential compliance gaps before they become an issue. Additionally, the deep visibility provided by the AI platform makes it easier to collect the information necessary for compliance reporting.

Enhance Your Operational Efficiency with AIOps

As AI continues to evolve, its potential uses in IT expand. AI can automate every stage of the IT troubleshooting and incident response process, from initial identification to executing AI-generated remediation plans. It also enables organizations to proactively manage their IT infrastructure, heading off potential incidents and issues due to flawed change requests.

An effective AIOps deployment requires well-trained AI models and deep subject matter expertise. As a Broadcom Strategic Partner, A&I can help your organization deploy industry-leading AIOps solutions by Broadcom tailored to your unique needs. To start your AIOps journey, book a demo or talk to an A&I team member today.

The post AIOps Use Cases: How AI Is Reshaping IT Management appeared first on A&I Solutions.

Tech Trends to Watch Out For 

Future developments in technology will likely include the following:

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

More businesses will use AI and machine learning in the future. In fact, many businesses have already invested in AIOps solutions as they recognize the value AI and machine learning can bring, such as intelligent automation, actionable insights, and full-stack observability. In 2023, companies will be looking to automate tasks, improve forecasts, and gain more visibility across distributed and diverse IT environments, all of which are achievable through advanced AIOps solutions.

Agile and DevOps Practices

Recent years have seen a noteworthy increase in using Agile and DevOps methods for developing software. This trend is set to continue in 2023 as businesses continue to use agile and DevOps techniques to help enhance the efficiency, dependability, and quality of their services and goods.

The agile method emphasizes teamwork, adaptability, and ongoing iteration during software development. It uses Agile Manifesto’s tenets as the basis for approaching work. These tenets encourage the quick delivery of high-quality software using agile, cross-functional teams.

On the other side, DevOps is a collection of principles that integrates development and operations teams. It aims to enhance teamwork and productivity across the software development lifecycle. This can involve techniques like infrastructure automation, continuous integration, and delivery.

Adopting these methods can help businesses become more adaptable and sensitive to changing consumer demands. 

Intelligent Search

This is one of the future trends for digital transformation. It employs sophisticated algorithms to comprehend user intent and deliver more relevant results. It can assist companies to enhance their web presence and provide better customer service.

In 2023, intelligent search will be popular due to the growing usage of AI and machine learning technology. Since employees work in a hybrid workplace, intelligent search is a crucial digital transformation approach. End users may access data from several places and data sets using intelligent search.

Intelligent search differs from conventional search engines because it provides answers tailored to a company. Its other names are cognitive search, AI-powered search, and natural language search. 

Cloud Computing Technologies

After years of development, cloud computing is more popular than ever and 2023 will be no different. Most businesses are moving from on-premise data centers to cloud services or a combo of the two.

Cloud technology has the power to transform business operations, making data accessible from any location. With cloud computing technologies, businesses may access their work remotely, which lessens the need for on-site facilities like data centers.

In 2023, distributed clouds will become a popular digital transformation trend. This is because more businesses are migrating to the cloud. By connecting to data and applications across many locations, this technology enables companies to innovate and be more resilient. The expanding benefits of cloud computing enable businesses to easily scale operations up or down.

Businesses will also be implementing multi-cloud strategies in 2023, enabling them to employ a variety of public clouds instead of one cloud service provider. The future of the cloud relies on hybrid cloud solutions, which combine local, public, and private clouds

Increase in Hybrid Work Model

Hybrid work has only recently become an effective option for companies. After the pandemic, the hybrid work paradigm became popular as a flexible working style. The future of work will likely involve even more distributed and remote environments. Therefore, companies will continue to invest in IT software and solutions like AppNeta that support this new hybrid work model.

Bottom Line

Technology is always changing. Therefore, organizations must stay on top of the latest trends and advancements to be competitive. Machine learning, hybrid work, intelligent search, and cloud computing are just some of the themes that will shape 2023. 

Learn how you can take advantage of these new tech trends with A&I Solutions. We are a leading provider of Broadcom Software solutions and services, offering a wide range of products, such as DevOps, AIOps, API Management, and ValueOps solutions. 

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POC Overview:

Modern enterprise networks are facing a new, unprecedented reality. Between adopting an internet-first approach, an influx of new traffic sources, and a shift to a hybrid and largely remote workspace, enterprise networks are more complex and difficult to manage than ever before. The solution? AppNeta by Broadcom Software.

In this session, we’ll explore how AppNeta can drive cloud, SaaS, and internet transformation as well as deliver work-from-anywhere (WFA) visibility, enhance the end-user experience, and make IT more efficient through 4-dimensional active and passive monitoring of business-critical apps and locations.

See AppNeta in Action

Learn more about AppNeta and see it in action by watching our on-demand demo video now!

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• root-cause analysis
• real-time data and insights
• comprehensive visibility of user experience, performance, and applications usage from both a real user and synthetic perspective
• …and more!

Want to know about DX APM? Check out this short product video to discover the what, why, and how of DX APM.

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According to a June 2022 Mckinsey survey, at least 58% of employees surveyed work remotely at least once a week. Another 35% of employees work the entire week remotely. 

With the rise of remote work came many changes, most of which companies were unprepared to deal with. Communication, collaboration, and most importantly, IT support and management became difficult. Many companies invested in more tech tools to accelerate remote working adoption. 

While the pandemic situation has lessened, it looks like remote work is here to stay. In fact, it’s predicted that 70% of the workforce will be working remotely at least 5 days a month by 2025. This growth of remote working has completely changed how IT teams operate. It has led to more challenges, but it has also given businesses the perfect environment to transition and adopt new technologies.

Today, we’ll explore how remote work has changed how IT teams operate. 

IT-Related Challenges Caused by Remote Work

Remote working allowed businesses to continue as usual. However, the working arrangement presented two main challenges to IT departments. Here’s a quick overview of these challenges. 

Cybersecurity Threats

Remote working gave cyber security criminals a larger ‘attack surface’ to strike. First, employees had to do most of their technology set-up themselves and do it quickly. This situation increased loopholes for cyber-attacks. In addition, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) arrangements were quite common, especially for smaller companies with smaller resources and budgets. 

For instance, many employees used their personal laptops or computers to access work applications. This meant that employees lacked the extra layer of protection that company devices offered. 

All these factors in a remote work environment contributed to the global cyber attack volume increasing by 238% during the pandemic. With an upsurge of cyber security concerns, IT teams were on their toes trying to prevent serious cybercrime repercussions. 

IT teams had to ensure everyone’s devices, including BYODs, were up to date. They had to train employees on how to avoid malware and phishing attacks. In cases where attacks were inevitable, the IT team needed to settle everything in record time to keep the business running smoothly. 

Less Visibility, More Support Tickets

Almost everyone who worked remotely experienced at least one technical issue, leading to lost productivity and delays. What does this mean for IT teams in a remote work environment?

There were and still are more IT issues to resolve as employees work remotely. Unlike in-person working, remote workers do not have on-site IT support. This means that IT teams generally took longer diagnosing IT issues and providing solutions to these problems. Support tickets shot through the roof, and many developmental goals had to be put on hold as the IT teams tried to help everyone adjust to remote work. 

These challenges of remote working mean that the IT teams have had to change how they operate. Let’s explore the new norm of IT teams in a remote work setting. 

Here’s How Remote Work Changed How IT Teams Operate

Supporting Distributed Teams 

Before the pandemic and the rise of remote work, most companies had an on-site IT department that cared for a company’s needs. Employees in most organizations also worked in-office with a few hybrid working cases. Now, a majority of companies work remotely with distributed teams across geographic regions and timelines. 

Distributed teams make it more challenging to expedite IT support and management seamlessly. There are different time zones to think about, the challenge of enforcing virtual networks, and the expected increases in cyber-attacks in a remote setting. 

IT departments have yet to strike the right balance between providing support and being proactive about technology concerns and development. 

Take network issues, for example. With distributed teams, there are multiple network infrastructures to manage. In most cases, IT teams monitor networks and applications through multiple tools. A fragmented monitoring system is not only inefficient, but it can also cost the company huge losses in lost business hours, cyber-attacks, and lost employee productivity. 

That’s why you need an ‘always-on remote monitoring approach’ to keep your IT networks and applications running. Therefore, having a platform that can automatically monitor the situation and provide solutions is critical. This tool acts like your eyes across your distributed remote locations. 

In turn, you can ensure that networks and applications work as they should. Your IT team will also handle all inconveniences and network problems in real time, preventing any pauses in critical business activities. 

AppNeta for Better Remote Network and Application Monitoring

If optimizing remote network monitoring is your priority now, AppNeta might be the perfect solution. This network performance monitoring solution helps businesses have total visibility into the end-user experience, giving insight into how networks and applications of their remote workforce are functioning. AppNeta does so by combining active and passive monitoring, thus ensuring end-to-end visibility of the end-user experience no matter where or when workers log in. 

With AppNeta, you can be sure your workforce won’t miss out on vital revenue-driving business activities. AppNeta supplies your IT team with real-time, actionable insight so that they can respond and address network issues faster, ensuring essential operations are running as expected.

Find out how AppNeta can benefit your remote workforce and organization. Contact A&I Solutions today to schedule a demo. 

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In today’s world, traditional monitoring doesn’t offer the required insights to spot, isolate and fix issues. This is because traditional methods only collect metrics passively and need teams to have ownership over monitored systems. Thus, these monitoring tools only provide visibility into some network hops and can’t offer end-to-end visibility of complex delivery paths. Due to this, IT can’t get enough information to prevent issues from becoming real problems, thus increasing inefficiency.

In order to provide a high-quality experience for users, applications must function properly. This means IT should have informed visibility into end-user experiences to enhance application performance. The question is, how do you consistently monitor your services to ensure they are working as they should? The answer: synthetic monitoring. With synthetic monitoring, you can confirm that your applications are performing as intended, enabling you to identify and solve problems before they affect users.

What Is Synthetic Monitoring?

Synthetic monitoring is a practice that tracks applications and websites by simulating user paths. It emulates typical user actions or behaviors within an API, a website, or a web application to test for availability, function, and performance.

Synthetic monitoring uses a scripting tool to create simulated user behavior for various scenarios, device types, geographical locations, and more. The scripts become the checks, agents, or monitors and can run automated tests at regular intervals to ensure applications are available, functioning, and performing as needed.

Synthetic monitoring is considered a proactive or active approach to testing. Since it conducts tests on a schedule, it differs from passive monitoring solutions, such as Real User Monitoring (RUM), that require user action to begin a test.

The problem with passive monitoring is that issues can go unnoticed for a long time when there is reduced site traffic. Due to the active approach of synthetic monitoring for testing a service or website, many consider it the first measure to defend against slowdowns and outages.

After obtaining and analyzing the relevant performance data, a synthetic monitoring solution can:

• Update you on issues relating to business transactions. For instance, it can let you know the challenges users might face while completing forms or purchases
• Provide you with valuable insightsthatshow the performance level of an application, such as page load speed
• Show you how your website responds to actual user behavior

Why Is Synthetic Monitoring Crucial?

Companies or brands that provide services or content through the internet or network should consider the importance of synthetic monitoring.

As a business’s networks and applications grow, IT’s ability to monitor and control service levels continues to diminish. The shift to remote and hybrid work makes users rely on the public internet connection, which requires edge network security. In addition, most external and internal applications are now cloud-hosted.

IT needs better solutions to monitor, manage, and improve application performance anywhere. Since accessibility and performance are paramount, brands shouldn’t wait for customers to notify them of an issue. Waiting for user complaints could lead to a loss of reputation and revenue for brands. For instance, a website that takes longer to load could lead to high bounce rates.

With little or no visibility, IT teams may find troubleshooting issues related to a particular user rather difficult. But with synthetic monitoring, IT teams would be alerted about an issue quickly before users become aware.

Simulating user behavior for testing purposes does the following:

Resolves Issues Early

Synthetic monitoring gives IT professionals comprehensive reports about an error. This enables them to quickly detect the root cause of an issue and fix it before it affects user experiences.

Monitors System Health

Synthetic monitoring can provide insights into your website’s availability. It can show you how fast or slow it’s operating, whether transactions are functioning as intended, and where a potential failure or slowdown might lie.

Enhances Resiliency

Synthetic monitoring can be useful in helping brands prepare for peak traffic periods or expect performance requirements in a new market or region.

Boosts Performance

Synthetic monitoring can provide performance benchmarks and highlight areas for optimization and improvement.

Keeps Tabs on Third-Party Providers

Third-party content could be in the form of advertising, CDNs, or payment management systems. These third-party providers’ performance affects the host site’s overall performance. But with an independent monitoring solution, you can hold these third-party vendors accountable for your product’s accessibility and performance.

Synthetic monitoring tools also help ensure brands meet service level agreements (SLAs) with end users.

Gain Comprehensive, End-To-End Visibility with AppNeta By Broadcom Software

AppNeta by Broadcom Software helps IT proactively monitor, manage, and optimize or improve performance, regardless of the apps or networks used. AppNeta combines active synthetic application and network monitoring with passive packet visibility. The unique blend of active and passive monitoring provides in-depth visibility of business-critical networks and apps from a user perspective.

Together with the wide range of solutions from Broadcom Software, you can enhance end-user experiences, make IT more efficient, and boost the success of your internet and enterprise cloud transformations.

Contact A&I Solutions to learn more about AppNeta and how its synthetic monitoring capabilities and more can help enhance your end-users’ experience.

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• High-scale, unified visibility
• Real-time performance monitoring
• Machine-learning, analytics-driven insight
• Network triage and root cause analysis
• End-user monitoring with AppNeta

Discover how DX NetOps can help you intelligently monitor your network and quickly get to the root of issues. Watch the video below to discover all of the powerful features and capabilities of this leading network monitoring solution.

Interested in Learning More?

See DX NetOps in action. View our on-demand video now.

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Legacy applications are the primary business drivers since they comprise most of the software that drives business revenues. Let us look at factors to consider when monitoring legacy apps.

What is a Legacy System?

In computing, a legacy system is an outdated application program, computer system, or technology used by an organization because it continues to perform the duties it was initially configured to do. Legacy systems do not have maintenance and support, and their growth is limited. Replacing them is equally demanding.

Since businesses constantly evolve due to reorganizations, changes in management, market conditions, laws, and the economy, some systems gradually become obsolete. IT systems are also continuously evolving to accommodate these changes, making it challenging for IT managers to comprehensively view them because different people install updates and adaptations over time.

Legacy systems play a crucial role within an organization. This is one of the reasons why they still exist in some companies. IT managers should identify an organization’s legacy system and whether they are worth maintaining. Legacy systems are integral to day-to-day operations, so their replacement and modernization must be intricately planned and assessed to minimize potential risks.

There are several concerns associated with working with legacy applications over time. Some of these considerations include:

• Lack of comprehensive deployment processes, including numerous manual tasks for deploying and creating a build. This results in a lack of trust while deploying new forms.
• Lack of automated testing, which causes regression issues: This may be particularly frustrating since fixing some creates more problems in other places, causing a lack of trust in the bug-resolution process.
• Lack of proper documentation over the years makes large segments of code base impossible to decipher.
• Poor code application or quality architecture is dictated by several factors (lack of capability, deadlines, etc.), causing challenges when making changes to the legacy system over time

These special considerations for legacy systems highlight the need for monitoring to optimize business operations and growth.

Differences Between Legacy Systems and Modern Applications

Modern applications differ from legacy systems in several ways. However, what makes them relatively similar is the role of these applications in business growth. Here’s a breakdown of the critical differences.

Modern systems:

• Service to service
• Proactive monitoring through AIOps
• Managed using automation powered by vendor tooling
• Integrates via API
• Security entails secrets management, data encryption, identity and access management (IAM), and multi-factor authentication (MFA)
• Accessed via the public internet
• Accessed from IoT & mobile devices

Legacy systems:

• Client to server
• Reactive monitoring by humans
• Managed using manual human effort
• Integrates through proprietary plugins
• The core form of defense is a firewall
• Accessed behind a firewall
• Accessed from laptops & desktops

The transition towards modernization is inspired by the need to ensure cost savings, reliability, better performance, mobile access, and large-scale usage. A company’s executives are the primary drivers of change as they understand the need to stay competitive in a highly dynamic technology landscape.

The Challenging Aspect of Monitoring Legacy Systems

The primary challenge associated with monitoring legacy applications is the manual processes that profoundly depend on humans. Contemporary monitoring tools transcend the application stack to track data and events from external applications and third-party networks. Automating this form of monitoring and supplementing it with machine learning. It is nearly impossible to track these processes successfully using traditional manual monitoring techniques that assess basic metrics such as latency, network requests, and uptime.

Security monitoring is another significant challenge associated with legacy applications. These applications are not designed for over-the-air or automated updates. Their security configurations are primarily static, and when lifted and shifted to the cloud, they may expose gaping vulnerabilities.

Monitoring is also complex when an application is part modern and part legacy. This is true for applications that are in the migration process from being monolith to microservices. The varied communication patterns and resource types may be challenging to track.

How AIOps Solutions Can Help Connect Existing Legacy Systems to Modern Applications

Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) is the application of AI and relevant technologies, such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to traditional IT Ops tasks and activities. Through algorithmic analysis of Observability telemetry and IT data, AIOps help SRE, DevOps, MLOps, NoOps, BizOps, and IT Ops teams to work faster and smarter so they can identify digital service issues promptly and address them quickly.

AIOps unifies the management of modern and legacy applications. For instance, it gives the user:

• Predictive security: There is an increased need for predictive security monitoring, with the increased susceptibility of security issues popping up when using legacy applications. This is the role of AIOps: They spot vulnerabilities and anomalies and detect patterns in legacy systems before they escalate and affect users.
• Legacy automation: AIOps underscores automated processes compared to manual ones. AIOps enables automation for both legacy and modern applications.
• Unified glass view: AIOps enables an end-to-end view of all systems, whether modern or legacy. Unlike a contemporary monitoring tool designed specifically to monitor modern applications, a robust AIOps solution spans both modern and legacy applications.

In Summary

Forward-thinking corporations understand the importance of monitoring their legacy systems. Modernization enables your organization to remain competitive. Plus, modernized legacy systems require less support from your IT professionals, allowing them to concentrate on other tasks that add value to your organization.

AIOps Solutions from Broadcom can help simplify the modernization process and help organizations get the most value out of the transition, streamlining how IT operations teams collaborate and work with other stakeholders.

Contact A&I Solutions to find out more about the AIOps solutions by Broadcom Software and how they can help your business.

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