Data management has caused headaches since the dawn of the big-data era in the early 2000s. Since then, the exponential increase in data has spawned a plethora of tools designed to control the increasingly complex demands of edge computing and the internet of things.

Humans alone or traditional tooling can’t keep up. The ideal solution: people plus machines. One way to bring man and machine together is known as algorithmic IT operations, shortened to AIOps.

“AIOps is … applying some automation, artificial-intelligence capabilities, machine-learning capabilities, statistical-analysis capabilities on a huge amount of data that you have in a centralized place,” said Guy Fighel (pictured), vice president of product engineering and general manager of AIOps at New Relic Inc.

Fighel spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the New Relic FutureStack event in New York City. They discussed the capabilities of the New Relic AI platform and how New Relic plans to compete in application performance monitoring and AIOps (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

New Relic AI augments site reliability engineers with AI and ML capabilities

The beta release of the New Relic AI platform, which is expected for general release in early 2020, runs on top of the New Relic One platform.

“[New Relic AI] is the first observability platform that is connected, open and programmable,” Fighel said, discussing how the platform allows users to combine existing information and data inside New Relic with new technologies and techniques developed thanks to the company’s acquisition of Israeli start-up SignifAI.

“[It has] pretty much integrated all of that into single user experience and single type of capabilities across the stack,” Fighel stated.

APM observability matched with AIOps understanding

As an open-source platform, New Relic AI allows users to choose the open-source instrumentation they prefer. “Whether you want to drop an agent, whether you want to use any other open-source software development kit. We allow you to do that,” Fighel stated.

In contrast, AIOps “has nothing to do with the monitoring, per se,” Fighel said. Instead, it is about the power to ingest and analyze millions, potentially billions, of items per second.

Combining AIOps capabilities with APM in one platform brings flexibility and drives increased value for the customer, according to Fighel. “APM is application performance monitoring. It’s all about monitoring and having that visibility to your application layer. It has nothing to do with AIOps. It has nothing to do with replacing the tools,” Fighel stated. “We believe that everyone should have visibility into their application.”

New data can be brought in by interconnecting with a customer’s incident management platform or through at rest API or native integrations, according to Fighel. “Or if customer chooses, they can just send us all of the data directly,” he stated. “Then, we apply the AIOps capabilities on top of the existing platforms.”

“Applied intelligence” is the term Fighel chooses to describe the capabilities of the New Relic AI platform. He chooses this because it augments rather than replaces site reliability engineers.

“We don’t believe that site reliability engineers needs to go away or can even be replaced anytime soon,” Fighel stated. Instead, New Relic AI aims to “help them understand, better and faster, the type of problems that they see in their production environments and then help them resolve that much faster and better.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the New Relic FutureStack event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the New Relic FutureStack event. Neither New Relic Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE