Surviving the Alert Storm in Today’s Data Center
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, modern data centers have adopted new technologies and applications, thus increasing their complexity. Data-dependent enterprises have found themselves moving towards distributed IT environments. As a result, data centers are demanding higher capacity to meet changing business requirements.
In any data center environment, monitoring tools are essential for measuring overall health and performance. They also provide real-time alerts about problems to data operators. However, modern data centers also face a storm of false alerts due to the massive increase in data volumes and complexity. Reportedly, 70-90% of generated alerts are either false negatives or positives.
Business-centric applications are a key driver of growing complexity in data centers. Also, the enterprise ecosystem is becoming home to a growing range of technologies like multi and hybrid cloud, edge devices, and an array of point solutions, custom applications, and integration platforms. This makes any outage or downtime very expensive. In fact, one recent study by Uptime revealed that while the frequency of serious outages is going down, their impact may not be doing so. 25% of all respondents reported that their most recent outage cost them over USD 1 million. 45% more said this cost was between USD 100,000 and 1 million.
As the complexity increases, so do the stakes considering how vital this tech infrastructure is to deliver operational performance. So, most enterprises have plans to handle issues arising in their infrastructure. Many of them also have deployed tools for monitoring infrastructure performance so problems can be identified early. This solution isn’t foolproof though. What often happens is that the tools are designed to flag a massive number of parameter violations. This means that the IT team is left to contend with a huge number of alerts. The net outcome is that they get stretched dealing with trivial problems and are often unable to prioritize the real issues that could snowball later. This becomes a reactive and opportunistic method with limited intelligence being applied by the systems.
How do false alerts pose a major challenge to data centers? How can data centers survive the alert “storm?” Let’s discuss this in this article.
How False Alerts Pose a Challenge to Data Centers
Large and complex data centers need constant monitoring to avoid any major failures. This includes real-time monitoring of business-critical applications and IT infrastructure, along with hardware components like the physical network, cables, cooling systems, and storage systems.
Additionally, data centers depend on the IT operations team to manually monitor their infrastructure. This can consume a lot of time and increase operational costs. Besides, false alerts are a major challenge for Security Operations Centers (SOC) analysts. A recent study found that SOCs waste around 10,000 hours and incur costs of around $500,000 each year on validating incorrect vulnerability alerts. ESG reports that data centers receive 53 daily alerts from applications and monitoring tools. 45% of these alerts are false positives.
The rapid advancement of technology tools and massive data volumes have advanced the need for constant monitoring in data center infrastructures. With all the “noise” around alerts, IT teams can only investigate and respond to a small percentage of alerts in a timely fashion.
False alerts can lead to dire consequences like:
- Increased downtime
- Lower productivity
- Surges in customer calls
- Direct and indirect impact on business revenues
More organizations are using monitoring tools to check the reliability and performance of their running applications. However, the question remains “how to check the reliability of the alerts sent by these tools?” The solution lies in reviewing and verifying the alert updates before responding to them.
To that end, let’s discuss how appNeura’s AIOps solution can solve these challenges.
How appNeura SNIPER Can Help in Reducing the Alert Storm
At appNeura, we understand that application performance can directly impact business success and market survival. Business solutions from appNeura leverage technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine learning (ML), and Big Data Analytics to automate IT operations, including data centers.
By reducing the alerts storm, appNeura enables its customers to improve application availability and performance. Powered by AIOps technology, the appNeura SNIPER solution enables business organizations to address complex challenges, including:
- Complex IT operations that comprise heterogeneous systems, cloud platforms, Agile applications, and mobile devices.
- Alert fatigue among IT operators caused by a higher data volume, velocity, and variety.
- Root cause analysis of complex problems performed manually, which is both time-consuming and prone to errors.
- Lack of consolidation of alerts generated from multiple monitoring tools (for the same technology stack and application)
- Poor collaboration due to siloed approach between Development and Operations.
- Analyze Unstructured Logs generated by application.
- Analyze hundreds of metrics to find the relevant one which causes the issues.
The appNeura SNIPER is the AIOps-powered incident management platform that can:
- Monitor-Analyze-Resolve issues occurring in IT operations and technology stacks across in its heterogeneous environments.
- Reduce the alert storm by 70-90%, thus delivering only relevant alerts to be worked on by the IT operations team.
- Perform real-time intelligent analysis of all generated alerts in a quick time.
- Automate Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and provide useful recommendations for solving complex problems.
- Obtain-Store-Analyze thousands of metrics and logs at full stack levels .
- Perform several AI/ML algorithms to detect anomaly and cluster relevant issues into a minimum number of incidents resulting in 35 to 45 % reduction in MTTR.
- Business view highlighting financials and issues which require attention.
Among the key business benefits, the appNeura SNIPER platform can optimize the performance of the IT operations team by 30-50%. Automation reduces people’s dependency and cuts down on the resolution time.
Conclusion
To leverage their digital capabilities, organizations deploy multiple tools to monitor their data center performance and efficiency. However, this can lead to an increase in false alerts that can compromise the productivity of the operations team.
At appNeura, our AIOps-powered SNIPER incident management platform can automatically rationalize alert-related updates, thus delivering the relevant ones to the IT team. With our AI-powered solutions, our clients have succeeded in improving their application performance by 150%.
Want to know more about how our AI-powered solutions can reduce the troubles of your IT operations team? Contact us today with your business details.