Digital operations infrastructure company OpsRamp Inc. is highlighting the growing trend toward using artificial intelligence to help monitor information technology operations, a practice that’s often referred to as “AIOps.”

The company early Monday posted the findings of a survey showing AIOps has great potential in helping enterprises to cut through the overwhelming amount of “noise,” or alerts they receive about potential problems with their information technology infrastructure.

Noise is emerging as a tricky problem for enterprises to contend with as they increasingly adopt multicloud strategies that involve running their IT on a mix of public and private clouds and on-premises platforms. OpsRamp in its survey found that 48 percent of enterprises report their current alert volumes as being “too noisy, too high or both,” while 51 percent said as many as half of all incidents they experience are recurring.

OpsRamp says that AIOps is the best way to reduce this noise and free up IT teams to focus on more pressing problems. AIOps is defined by Gartner Inc. as platforms that “combine big data, AI/machine learning and other technologies to support all primary IT operations functions with proactive, personal and dynamic insight.”

Digging deeper, however, Wikibon analyst James Kobielus said AIOps performs a more specific role than this:

“It refers to AI’s use as a tool to make infrastructure and operations more continuously self-healing, self-managing, self-securing, self-repairing and self-optimizing,” he wrote in a recent report. “AI’s growing role in IT infrastructure management stems from its ability to automate and accelerate many tasks more scalably, predictably, rapidly and efficiently than manual methods alone.”

Kobielus also noted the importance of AIOps, saying that without its ability to perform continuous log analysis, anomaly detection, predictive maintenance, root cause diagnostics, closed-loop issue remediation and other critical functions, the adoption of multicloud strategies could become “infeasible or cost-prohibitive” for many organizations.

Those insights seem to tally with OpsRamp’s findings in its survey of 120 IT decision makers at companies with at least 500 employees. It found that more than two-thirds of those surveyed had experimented with AIOps tools, with almost three-quarters looking to gain more useful insights related to IT system alerts. The survey results show AIOps seems to have great potential in this regard, with 74 percent of respondents saying such platforms could help to automate tedious tasks, and 67 percent saying it can help to improve root-cause analysis.

Survey respondents also pointed out what they thought were the most beneficial features of AIOps tools. OpsRamp said 63 percent of enterprises felt that ease of deployment and orchestration was most important; followed closely by “knowledge capture,” as well as easy-to-understand dashboards and hybrid-readiness, or the ability to use AIOps in hybrid IT environments.

The good news is that hardware providers are already implementing these features. One recent example is Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co.’s recently updated 3PAR StoreServ all-flash storage arrays, which now come embedded with InfoSight — HPE’s cloud-based AI platform for storage management — enabling users to spot issues before they happen and take action to remedy them.

“This enhancement enables HPE 3PAR customers improve the availability, performance and utilization of existing storage resources and workloads in on-premises data centers and private cloud environments,” Kobielus said.

Of course, AI itself has plenty of other uses besides just monitoring IT stacks, with popular use cases including enhancing and optimizing IT workloads. But OpsRamp’s survey makes it clear that AIOps is fast becoming one of the most prevalent use cases of AI.

“Enterprise IT operations professionals are overwhelmed with alerts and they’re challenged to distinguish between legitimate signals and loud but harmless noise,” saidMahesh Ramachandran, OpsRamps’ vice president of product management. “We know from the survey data that even a relatively small reduction – up to 25 percent – in the number of alerts received by IT operations teams would be considered a success in terms of a company’s AIOps strategy.”

Images: OpsRamp